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Old 06-20-2010, 06:10 AM   #124 (permalink)
jibber
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Originally Posted by littleknowitall View Post
See this is where it gets hard to establish why this is, is it because in media in terms of America, Canada, Britain and Australia other countries have learned English to accommodate with this large media market and therefore causing the British population to not worry too much about learning second languages or is it just 'cause were a bunch of lazy ****s who think we're better than the rest of Europe...
Actually I was thinking more about the business/academic standards across the globe. Any multinational corporation will do business in English. Over here, even Turkish companies give their employees higher salaries if they are able to speak English. A lot of Turkish universities give classes in English (not English classes, I mean the language actually spoken in the university is English). Nearly every university student in Korea or Japan will take English as either a requirement of their degree, or just because they view it to be necessary.

It's not just hollywood movies and the media that's driving this. It's not that "we" think we're better than the rest of the world, it's that the rest of the world has long since decided that English is the global language and that in the grand scheme of thing they'll get left behind if they don't learn the language. If you go back to the colonial era, England not only spread their kingdom all over the world but they established a VERY long history of the English language being imposed on foreign cultures. For the most part, that hasn't really changed much.
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