Is English becoming the world language?

Many people today believe that English is already the world language, or is in the position of becoming that. This is particularly true of English-speakers who have not travelled much, or who have kept to the equivalent of Hilton Hotels in their travels.

Let’s look at the facts.

There are perhaps 375 million native speakers of English, about five and a half percent of the world’s population, and most of its dialects are mutually intelligible.

That is very impressive.

Only two or three languages have more native speakers. Depending on how you count, these are Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, and Spanish. Mandarin (also called Standard Chinese) stands out as the language of about 14% of us all. The exact percentage depends on whether you count all its dialects.

This 14% count includes the various sub-dialects of Mandarin, not other Chinese forms such as Cantonese, Hakka, or Taiwanese. If these persons are added (and most now have Mandarin as their second language) the ‘Chinese speaking’ figure is even more impressive, close to 20% of humanity.

[ Incidentally, I have written a book on variety within China: The Chinese Mosaic, currently out of print. ]

However, most observers around the world will agree that Chinese in any present-day form is not likely to become the world language. While its figures are far more than twice those of English, its distribution is not nearly as widespread.

English is widespread.

While some 60% of native speakers of English are North Americans, well over 15% are in the UK and Ireland, about 5% in Australia or New Zealand, perhaps 2% in Africa (primarily in South Africa or Nigeria.) In Asia, there are quite a few native speakers of English in places like the Philippines or Guam, even in Singapore and Hong Kong.

Native speakers of Arabic, Portuguese, and Bengali all run close to 4% each of the world population, once again depending on how you count dialects (particularly those of Arabic.)

But to evaluate the role of English, we must address the secondary users of languages, those with English as a second or third language—provided it is at a level of valuable use.

Some of the census figures are very impressive. Almost half of the population of Pakistan claim English as a second language. More than half in Nigeria and the Philippines.

For India, the figure is only about 12% as a second language, but more as a third language. Given the size of India’s population, those using English in India are more numerous than those in the United States or any other country.

Large numbers have a degree of command of English in places like Egypt, Bangladesh, and Japan. Everyday usage is exceedingly high in places far and wide, like Malta in the Mediterranean or Suriname in South America. And so it goes.

So many diverse places.

This global spread for a language is unprecedented.

So many diverse uses as well.

English is the worldwide language of air-traffic control and is easily available in most international airports. It is the commonest language for the conduct of international business. More than two-thirds of the world's scientists can read in English to some degree in their field. It dominates fields as diverse as astronomy, the cinema, diplomacy, most sport, popular music, and advertising.

Here are what I consider the two key facts (the exact numbers are only the commonly accepted estimates):

1) More than eighty per cent of the world's electronically stored information is in the English language.

2) About a billion persons who do not have a command of English are studying it today, typically in secondary schools.

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So then, is English already the ‘world language’ . . ?

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Ah ha!

There are, perhaps, ‘flies in the ointment,’ as the saying goes.

Some population projections show the percentage of English speakers likely to decline in the face of more and more speakers of Chinese, Hindi, Spanish and Arabic. Some economic studies show the expansion of China, Brazil, India, Germany, Japan, and perhaps Russia to loom larger than that of the English-speaking nations.

But the unpredictable future is not the only problem.

It is already the fact that those in one country with some knowledge of English may not find it of much use with those in other countries. Thus, a Nigerian speaker of English may not understand a Japanese speaker of English.

Much of the prestige of English today is a reflection of the world position of the U.S.A. at the end of the Second World War and then at the end of the Cold War. The pretentions of Russian as the ‘future socialist world language’ collapsed. Free market economics made English essential for international ‘biznes’—even in Russia.

However, the disfavor of many nations with the policies of the Bush administration reminded us that the U.S. may not always enjoy this level of prestige. The U.S. position in the world economy and in fields like pop music, advertising, science, technology, and the internet, may not always be as impressive as it has been. Focus on the values of British culture has already faded to a degree within the former Empire.

Moreover, there is evidence that many who claim to speak English (in the census statistics above) do not have any well-rounded competence in it.

Does a taxi driver in Bangkok speak English because he can use it to get his rides from the airport to their hotels?

We will address some of this in a future entry.

The Value of Acadon

Many years of work have gone into the creation of Acadon, although only a few persons have been aware of it at all. Is there value in the final product?

 Well, no language is final, but in the form we already have, we believe there is tremendous potential in the Acadon system. We feel that anyone will be able to use it to some advantage, often with scant prior learning involved.

 Acadon has many potential uses. Not all users of Acadon will have the same goals. While Acadon is designed to give access to all digital data available in the English language, that is not its only use.

 Those who do not have a full command of English will find it far easier to learn than English, with fully regular spelling, regularized grammar, built-in keys to sentence structure, fewer separate word roots to learn, and only about half as many sounds that must be distinguished.

There follows a list some of the things that Acadon does better than English. Many are far from trivial. Some examples:

1) Acadon spelling is completely regular. This alone saves the learner much of the time that would be spent on learning English. (Yet any Acadon text written by a learner can be automatically put into English, with no spelling errors at all.) 

2) Acadon lacks dialectical and regional variations of spelling and pronunciation that plague English. 

3) Acadon has far fewer sounds (phonemes) than English. About half as many as some versions of English. 

4) Acadon has far fewer consonant clusters than in English. 

5) Word endings are few in Acadon, only the vowels or six consonants ( s, n, m, r, c, l, t, ) Furthermore, all syllables end only in these. 

6) Acadon has about half as many vowel distinctions as English. The primacy of the three most easily distinguished vowels worldwide, [i] [a] [u], is used in word selection. 

7) Despite the constraints, Acadon vocabulary is far more global than that of English. Roots are widely international. 

8) Acadon better integrates certain non-English words and concepts into its lexicon than does English. 

9) It is easier to master the total Acadon vocabulary than English. Words are more regularly derived. Prefixes and suffixes are more specific. 

10) Part of speech is more recognizable in Acadon. 

11) Provision is made to clarify many forms of the ambiguities that exist in English, both grammatical and semantic. 

12) Sentence structure and grammar is far more regular and transparent in Acadon than in English. 

13) Acadon words are much safer for the learner to pronounce than English. The danger of learners making confusing or embarrassing mistakes has been systematically reduced. For example, the Japanese and others will be happy that no two Acadon words are distinguished only by the difference between an [l] and an [r]. 

14) The stress (accentuation) on Acadon words is completely regular, in contrast to English. 

15) Acadon sentences are much clearer than English to understand when heard. Words are not slurred. This will also help machines to understand spoken commands. 

16) Compared to English, Acadon more effectively supports computer interface, particularly speech recognition systems. There are no homophones for example. 

17) Acadon provides ways for casting words and sentences into less ambiguous forms than possible in English. 

18)  Acadon more naturally avoids many sexist and ethnocentric usages common in English. 

19) Acadon is more precise than English in a variety of ways that support scientific communication and the usefulness of scientific nomenclature. 

20)  Acadon provides several mnemonic systems of considerable usefulness. 

21) Acadon has a recognized system for expressing certain complex shades of meaning (for example, degrees of probability) much more effectively and naturally than English. 

22)  Acadon provides a concise way to integrate mathematical formulae and symbolic logic into normal spoken sentences. Symbolic language is built into the structure of Acadon for those who might wish to use it to clarify relationships. 

23) For the hearing impaired, Acadon is designed to be easier to lip-read than English. 

24) There is an unimplemented project for an Acadon font that should help those with dyslexia. 

25) Acadon will have a presence in fantasy fiction. 

Acadon provides easier access to the vast amount of information stored in, or transmitted via, the English language. It is at the same time as neutral and international a medium as can be designed for its purposes. 

Above all, Acadon can be learned in a fraction of time that it takes to learn English. Because of the many difficulties of English, many students of the language around the world end up unsuccessful at mastering English in any useful way. The success rate for Acadon will be very significantly higher.

Categorizing Acadon

Acadon is a Controlled Language (CL), that is to say that it is a consciously designed language with carefully controlled phonetics, structure, and vocabulary designed to reduce ambiguity and complexity and provide for more efficient communication on a worldwide scale. Most immediately, Acadon can give those who are not native speakers of English wider and better access to data on the Internet. But it has many additional uses.

 

We will leave it to professional linguists to decide whether Acadon qualifies as a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) or not. We feel it is natural enough to fall in that category. Perhaps it could be called a subset of English. However, the issue of terminology is not basic to what Acadon is designed to do. Those interested in CNLs can find information on the web. One definition: "Controlled Natural Languages are subsets of natural languages whose grammars and dictionaries have been restricted in order to reduce or eliminate both ambiguity and complexity. Traditionally, controlled natural languages fall into two major categories: those that improve the readability for human readers, in particularly for non-native speakers, and those that improve the computational processing of a text."

 https://sites.google.com/site/controllednaturallanguage/

 

One of the unique features of Acadon is that it is linked to the written English language. This means that it is what we call a Linked Alternative Language (LAL). Acadon differs from all other designed languages in that it is a LAL. With its link to English, Acadon can immediately translate any English text into its own vocabulary and format. This is done in an non-lossy manner, that is without any errors or loss of meaning. It is, and always will be, impossible for Internet translation programs to produce non-lossy texts.

 

The concept of a Linked Alternative Languages is unique to us. 

http://www.google.com/patents/US6275789 While such LALs can be created with linkage to Chinese, Japanese, or any other language, we have not done anything more than a few tests along this line. 

 

We wish to make it clear that Acadon is not designed to be used as a Pivot Language (PL), a language used as a universal means of translation between two other languages. (Pivot Languages do not work well, though English is sometimes used as such. Acadon would incidentally serve this purpose better than English.)

 

While Acadon is most properly a Controlled Language of some sort, it also falls in the category of the International Auxiliary Language (IAL). An IAL is a language that can be used as a second language for communication between persons belonging to differing linguistic cultures. Latin was long used as such in Europe, Classical Chinese in much of East Asia, Sanskrit in South Asia, etc. Of course, these languages were regional, not global, while most IALs today have global pretentions.

 

There have been many artificially designed IALs, such as Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, or Interlingua. That such artificial languages can be used quite normally is most particularly shown by Esperanto, especially by its use in Eastern Europe, and by the fact that some children have been quite normally raised with it as their first language.

 

Acadon is very, very different from all the many IALs that have been spun on the Internet. It has features none of them have. It also lacks many of the features that have limited the success of such projects.

 

How Acadon differs from all other controlled language and artificial language projects will be discussed in a further note here.

 

Best regard,                  Leo

 

Language Design

 

 

We have been involved in creating Acadon for many years. Much remains to be done to implement all its potential powers. Many aspects of the language are set by its nature as a linked alternative language, but not all.

 

What you will see in an Acadon text may puzzle you, but there was a reason for every word, for every choice. No language is perfect, none ever will be. Feedback is always valuable. There is considerable complexity in the design of the language, which will hopefully not be obvious to the learner at all.

 

Ease of learning is a major goal, but not the only one. More on this later. But hold in mind that a language must above all be useful. There are many aspects to this. Our goal is to make Acadon useful, and in ways no other language is.

 

No language, of course, is ever done, despite the efforts of academies and agencies to establish permanent norms. It is my opinion that the efforts in France to retain the ‘purity’ of the French language, will in the long run fail. The Italians have been much wiser in this regard.

 

In creating Acadon, I have at times provided linguistically interested friends with samples of what might be called Acadon-in-progress and gotten feedback. Most of this has been done on the Internet.

 

To experiment with possibilities and to research vocabulary possibilities, I early on developed a sister language called Bahasan. Various short texts in it were circulated on the Internet long ago. This was done in order to get reactions more widely. Project Bahasan was always described as an experimental project centered primarily on the search for worldwide vocabulary. Some of it lives on in Acadon. The concept of a linked alternative language was not mentioned.

 

Languages are complex. No language can be learned overnight.

 

If you know English, or can at least read it, you will find Acadon far easier to learn than any language you have ever come across. And the learning will, we hope, be a joy.

 

But you do not need to know English to use Acadon. Quite the contrary. Much of the value of Acadon will be for those who do not know English and have not the time or resources to learn it properly. They will be able to gain access to the data recorded in English with far less effort. Do other things, too.

 

Many Acadon sentences may be transparent to you at first glance, especially if you are an English speaker with some knowledge of a Latin-based language. But other sentences may stump you at first—some may take a bit of learning for almost everyone.

 

This is unavoidable.

 

For the entire language, the amount of learning required will vary in accordance with the learner’s experience.

 

This is very unfortunate but also unavoidable.

 

A Chinese who knows only Mandarin will find Acadon more difficult to learn than a Chinese who has studied a bit of English or Russian. Someone who knows only Arabic will find Acadon more difficult to learn than will a neighbor who can read French or German. A speaker of Japanese or Korean who has not learned a word of English, Persian, Hindi, French, or Russian will find it more difficult than those who have. A speaker of Zulu who also knows Afrikaans, will find it far easier than one who is monolingual.

 

There is no way of rationally preventing this.

 

Yet any person on this globe will find Acadon far easier to master than English, French, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Persian, German, Hindi, or Japanese. Much easier also than Spanish, Portuguese, or Indonesian. Easier than any natural language, actually.

 

It is so designed.

 

Whether Acadon is simpler than the various artificially designed languages of the past (Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, etc.) might be contested by advocates of those languages. I believe, however, that practice will show that Acadon is more easily learned by global populations. Taking Esperanto as an example, it has an accusative case, requires agreement of adjectives with nouns, future tenses of verbs, and many other grammatical features that are unfamiliar to the more than one billion Chinese. The word order patterns of English (which are reflected in Acadon) happen to be more familiar to Chinese.

 

Let’s look at Asia. Vast numbers of people there will need communication skills in the future, needs never envisioned by their ancestors.

 

English is touted as the international language, and many sweat to learn it. Some succeed.

 

In 2006 a Chinese official stated that more than 300 million Chinese had studied English as a major or elective course. The reality is that many of these classes have been poor, the teachers hardly qualified. Yet these students have been exposed to many things to be found in Acadon as well as English. It can prime them for greater success if they focus on Acadon.

 

Among the more than a billion persons living in India many have substantial contact with English, and the teachers are far better qualified. Almost the entire population of Japan has studied English, and while the average Japanese is not in full control of English by any means, its structure and much of its vocabulary are widely known. More people are listed as speaking English in the Philippines than  in the United Kingdom.

 

In Africa, Nigerian Pidgin English is reported to be a second language for up to 75 million people. The Internet even has its Naija-lingo pages. Similar pidgins stretch across all of West Africa. English is an official language of many African nations, although the percentage of the population who have succeeded in mastering English is often small.

 

However, English has several strikes against it in becoming the international auxiliary language in the fuller sense:

1)  It is difficult to write correctly, since its spelling is chaotic. Thousands of hours are wasted even by native speakers in learning to spell. And even our electronic spell checkers cannot always help.

2)  Many words that are spelled the same, sound differently.

3)  Many words that are spelled differently sound the same.

4) Stress (accentuation) within the word is irregular, shifting, and unmarked.

4)  There are national variations in spelling, especially between the UK and US, but others as well.

5) Spoken English is a snarl, especially in the pronunciation of vowels. Most learners have to commit to either British or American English, but there are Australian and Indian and other well-established forms.

6)  Even then, the student of any form of English has to learn to distinguish and accurately produce an unusually large inventory of variant sounds (phonemes) and some of these are quite rare elsewhere.

7)  Many languages have five or six vowels, most forms of English have more than twice as many.

8)  There are many ambiguities in English that don’t exist in other languages and can be clarified.

9)  Some important distinctions are hard to hear in the spoken English. (For example, whencan or can’t is followed by a word beginning in t-.)

10) There are many grammatical irregularities in English that could be cleared up. (sing, sang, sung; go, went, gone; ).

 

There is, of course, also the historical or social dimension. This has changed over time. Some still consider English a colonial language. From time to time, the Soviets had tended to characterize English as if a capitalistic language. Some Islamic groups may consider it a Christian language. In parts of Africa, it may be viewed as the white-man’s language. Gradually, however, the diversity of those using English, especially on the Internet, has reduced these various stereotypes.

 

Unlike other designed languages, Acadon brings immediate access to vast amounts of data. This advantage will be the major consideration for potential learners. Languages are learned for a purpose.

Babel and Kondratov's 'Miracle'

Alexander Mikhailovich Kondratov (1937-1993) was a remarkable man. He lived in Russia during difficult times, when freedom of expression was severely limited.  Yet he managed to survive, even though he was full of intriguing ideas about history and many of the mysteries of our world.

Among other things, Kondratov was a linguist, a poet, an enthusiast of the sciences, and perhaps even something of a Zen Buddhist. That he could accomplish so much, and publish dozens of books on varied topics, was something of a miracle. More data at:

http://wn.com/alexandr_mikhailovych_kondratov/wiki

I have a book of his on linguistic issues, Звуки и знаки, Sounds and Signs (Moscow: Знание, 1966). In it, Kondratov discusses many issues of interest to the Acadon project.

In a chapter entitled ‘Tower of Babel,’ he addresses various concepts of a universal or mediating language. He mentions the Biblical story of that tower.

I’ll cite a version here: 

In those days the whole world had one language and a common speech.  As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there. They said to each other, “Come, let us make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, with tar for mortar.  And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.” But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.  And the Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them!  Come, let us go down and confuse their language, so they will not  understand each other.” In this way the Lord scattered them from there over the face of the earth, and they stopped building the city.  That is why the place was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the mankind. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Alexander says of the story: “. . . there is truth in it. When people are united they are capable of great deeds, and language is a tool by which unity and understanding can be attained.  Man has by now reached into the sky without building a tower. . . deep into space. . . . But the world still lacks a common language. To reach into the cosmos proved easier than to create a universal language for the inhabitants of earth.”

He goes on to recount the various ‘mediating languages’ that were in fact used in wide areas of the world for intercommunication: Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Classical Chinese, Classical Arabic, the various pidgins and lingua francas. He then discusses invented languages such as Volapük and Esperanto, both products of the late Nineteenth Century.

Ultimately Kondratov despairs of such efforts. “A language only gains currency when it is indispensible,” he observes.  All scientific literature, he asserts, is being written in Russian, English, French, or German. Almost nothing in anything like Esperanto. So even if an invented language is vastly easier, it will not be learned. The useful language will be studied, even if it is exceedingly difficult.

However, he adds a paragraph: 

 “An artificial language would become widespread if by some miracle the bulk of scientific and engineering journals and books were written in that language. But miracles don’t  happen.”

Acadon does not claim to be a miracle by any means, but it is capable of doing precisely that!

The Acadon system can put everything currently in English into its format, almost instantly and completely seamlessly. No translation errors at all.

Acadon differs sharply from all previous proposals for an ‘international language’ in that it does not rely on utopian hopes and dreams for the future.  Instead, it is designed to bring immediate value to anyone who uses it right now. It does not even need to be ‘learned’ before it can be put to use. With its built-in technology, any relatively simple computer can automatically transfer Acadon texts back and forth into English. It is a tool designed for the age of the Internet and for immediate use. In practice, simple exposure and use will teach people Acadon, not complex grammatical explanations.

Furthermore, the Acadon system takes advantage of many opportunities and is able to form a language that is in many ways better than English. Yes, better.

The English language is very popular worldwide and provides value to  people of almost every nation and culture. To create a language that is better than English in any significant way, is a remarkable achievement.

We believe that we are in the process of doing that.

Happy holiday!

Today, the Seventeenth of August, is hereby proclaimed a holiday, at least for those of us here at Acadonea.

We needed a good holiday in August didn’t we?

Think of all the holidays in January and February.  It’s been unfair to the month of August.

So what kind of a holiday is it today? Let’s call it a birthday—those make excellent holidays.

But we are here to celebrate the birth of something other than a person. What we wish to celebrate right now is the birth of a language.

Yes, an entire new language, one like no other in many ways.  Something called an engineered language, and one inherently usable as an international auxiliary language.

The language is called Acadon. The realm in which it thrives, we will call Acadonea.

We have had an Acadon website for well over a decade now. Meanwhile, the language has been under development. For your mother or mine, that would have seemed a long period of gestation. This is not necessarily so for an entire language, especially one with so ambitious a program ahead of it.

This blog will describe and discuss Acadon—ask you for advice from time to time.

Very little about the basic nature of Acadon was revealed in that early website. You can still find it at :http://acadon.com/index.html .  It is not so much outdated as it is incomplete. It does not actually reveal what makes Acadon unique.

But Acadon is unique—the first and only ‘linked alternative language.’ It has a complex link to written English. This means that every aspect of Acadon has been engineered to retain a lexemic and grammatical link to English in order to translate seamlessly everything currently digitized in English. We are talking about what some call non-lossy translation.

(My son Robert and I were advised to get a patent on the system of linked alternative languages and the varied procedures and mechanical subsets for controlling linkage and taking full advantage of the concept in design. NOTE: The use of Acadon as a language is, of course, free of any patent or other restrictive control.)

While Acadon mirrors English, it has a life of its own. For example, a system called MarkedEnglish enables Acadon to go beyond many of the ambiguities, confusions, alternative spellings, irregularities, and other limitations and difficulties of English.

Acadon is, moreover, capable of avoiding what is often cited as the inherent sexism of the English language.

Ultimately, use of the MarkedEnglish feature, can speed the location of needed information on the internet.

We have developed test software to translate from English to Acadon. A few years back, for example, we translated the Old Testament (the King James version). It took less than 30 seconds to translate it all into Acadon. With newer software, the time would be much less. All of Gutenberg materials, all of the Wikipedia, all the Internet in English, will translate into Acadon with great speed.

To do all this, Acadon must have a large vocabulary. All the words in the Old Testament, have long been in Acadon (even the archaic ones). But English has a vast vocabulary. There were about 50,000 words in the Acadon list when that test was made on the Bible, now there are about 90,000.

Great care must be taken in choosing Acadon words for ease of worldwide learning, regularity of form, ease of pronunciation, etc. Unfortunately a great deal of work has still to be done in hammering out the detailed vocabulary needed. Science and technology churn out words rapidly.

All these words must fit together under rules that minimize the potential for cross-cultural misunderstanding. This includes assuring that no two words sound too much alike, considering the way they might be in fact pronounced by speakers of various languages around the world. For example, no two Acadon words should be similar except for an L vs. R difference since Japanese and other languages do not have both. There are many such cases to be avoided.

Acadon can give non-speakers of English access to the vast base of digitized data available in the English language. And it will be far easier to learn than English, with:

fully regular spelling, a much more regular grammar, built-in keys to sentence structure,

fewer separate word roots that must be learned, and about half as many basic sounds (phonemes) that must be distinguished.

Acadon not only eliminates many of the difficulties of learning and using English, but also does or can do many things that English cannot. Many of these are of potential value to English speakers. More on that later.

More on everything later.  So for now . . .

If August 17 is your birthday, good for you! You’ll have your birthday made a holiday, at least here. Acadon Day!

Congratulations and ‘Happy Birthday!’

There was only about one chance in 365* that it would be yours. If so, you were lucky. Let us know.

Regards,  

                                         Leo John Moser

*Let’s not forget February 29, ‘leap-day.’

That was my grandmother’s birthday by the way.