Status Bahasa Inggris - Status of English

Status bahasa Inggris? Seperti orang saja ya ada statusnya segala____ Bagi teman-teman yang sedang mencari bahan referensi tentang bahasa Inggris,  baik laporan ilmiah, makalah, skripsi dan karya ilmiah lainnya, mungkin tulisan Status bahasa Inggris ini perlu dibaca dengan seksama. Untuk itu mari kita lihat penjelasan Finegan (2009: 59-60) berikut ini :

Although Chinese is spoken by a greater number of people, English is spoken around the globe with a wider dispersion than any other language. From its earlier home in Britain (now with 60 million speakers), it has spread to nearby Ireland (4 million), across the Atlantic to North America (where some 215 million residents over the age of five speak it in the United States and as many as 20 million in Canada) and across the world to Australia and New Zealand (with more than 20 million speakers).

English is the sole official language in more than a score of other countries: Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe in Africa; Jamaica, the Bahamas, Dominica and Barbados in the Caribbean; and the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, to name a sample. Elsewhere it shares official status with one or more languages in a score ofnations, including Tonga, Tanzania, Cameroon, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, the Philippines, Western Samoa, Kiribati, Pakistan and India (where it is an associate official language alongside Hindi). In still other nations, English holds no official status only because its widespread use in government (often alongside an indigenous tongue) and in trade is taken for granted. The United States, with no designated official language, is the most prominent of such cases. In still other nations, English is of such commercial and scientific advantage that consideration is repeatedly given to making it an official language.

Substantial portions of the populations of the United States and Canada speak English as a second language, many of them immigrants, but others born there and raised in families and neighbourhoods struggling to preserve the language and culture of ancestral lands. One well known example is that of French speakers in Canada, who constitute a majority only in Quebec province but whose influence is so strong nationally that Canada is officially a bilingual nation. Less well known is how many speakers of languages other than English reside in the United States. The United States Census reports that in 2003 more than 48 million residents over the age of five spoke a language other than English at home. This suggests that a good many residents of the United States speak English as a second language. Los Angeles is a sufficiently bilingual city that balloting materials for all elections are available in Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean and Tagalog, and similar multilingualism characterises voting materials in other American cities. Elsewhere, Nigeria, Ghana and Uganda have almost two million speakers of English as a second language each and the Philippines more than

11 million. Likewise, the millions who speak English in Pakistan and India have learned it, for the most part, not in their infancy but as a second language, a lingua franca for governmental and educational functions.

Beyond its uses as a first and second language in ordinary intercourse, English is the lingua franca of much scholarship, particularly of a scientific and technical nature. In addition, throughout the world are English-speaking universities in which instruction and textbooks use English as a principal medium. Reflective of its widespread dissemination and perhaps its adaptability is the fact that Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded to more writers using English than any other language and, in particular, that these laureates have been citizens of Australia, Ireland, India, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Nigeria and South Africa, as well as the United States and Britain. At the United Nations, English is an official language, alongside Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian and Spanish. A quarter of the world’s population is said to be competent in English—that would be 1.5 billion people (Crystal 2003).

Yah begitulah status bahasa Inggris untuk sekarang ini... Mungkin tahun depan bisa berbeda lagi....

Referensi :

Finegan, Edward. 2009. English. In Comrie, Bernard (ed). The World's Major Languages 2nd Edition. London and New York: Routledge.