In the News: "The English Empire"
In the News: "The English Empire"
February 14, 2014
According to a piece in The Economist's Schumpeter blog, a growing number of businesses worldwide have made English their official language. The piece reads, "Businesses worldwide are facing up to the reality that English is the language on which the sun never sets." An excerpt of the story is below:
"YANG YUANQING, Lenovo’s boss, hardly spoke a word of English until he was about 40: he grew up in rural poverty and read engineering at university. But when Lenovo bought IBM’s personal-computer division in 2005 he decided to immerse himself in English: he moved his family to North Carolina, hired a language tutor and—the ultimate sacrifice—spent hours watching cable-TV news. This week he was in São Paulo, Brazil, for a board meeting and an earnings call: he conducted all his business in English except for a briefing for the Chinese press.
Lenovo is one of a growing number of multinationals from the non-Anglophone world that have made English their official language. The fashion began in places with small populations but global ambitions such as Singapore (which retained English as its lingua franca when it left the British empire in 1963), the Nordic countries and Switzerland. Goran Lindahl, a former boss of ABB, a Swiss-Swedish engineering giant, once described its official language as “poor English”. The practice spread to the big European countries: numerous German and French multinationals now use English in board meetings and official documents."
To read the piece in its entirety, click here to visit The Economist online.
This post in The Economist highlights how the United States government is behind in declaring English the official language. Doing so would add an incentive for all non-English speakers to learn the common language of the nation-- and the world.
To participate in a U.S. English campaign to pressure Congress to take action, please click here to visit our Action Center. Here, you may click on the scrolling campaigns at the top of the page to send a pre-written letter to your Congressional representatives in support of Official English legislation. With your help, we can make a difference!
U.S. English, Inc. is the nation's oldest and largest non-partisan citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States. Founded in 1983 by the late Sen. S.I. Hayakawa of California, U.S. English, Inc. () now has more than 2 million members.
