People sometimes think of Britain and Australia as mono-lingual, countries with only one operational language: English. It is the language of business, of government, of education, of shopping, of society. But a moment's reflection (show)s that sizeable sections of the people of Australia (carry out) part or most, in a few cases all, of their day-to-day transactions in other languages: Greek, Italian, Serbo-Croat, or Pijinjanjara, one of the many aboriginal tongues. And in Britain we have Welsh and Gaelic as well as the mother tongues of immigrants - as we (call) them - especially Urdu, Hindi and Bengali.
604 million people, many more have some knowledge of English now than 30 years ago; but while the numbers (are rising) the quality and range of command (are dropping), and the opportunities for using English (are shrinking) in general. In Malaysia, English is progressively (phasing out) as the medium of education in the secondary schools. In Fiji, the Department of Education (is alarmed) at the decline in communicative efficiency in English, which forms the only link between speakers of Mbau, the Fijian lingua franca, and the other half of the population, of Indian descent. And in South Africa, amongst the whites, native speakers of Afri-kaans appear steadily (to become) less proficient at English.
By and large, however, English is on the increase, and in a variety of contexts and purposes. In countries where English is spoken as the principal mother tongue, there is a slight to moderate increase in the number of English users. As an alternative all-purpose vehicle of communication, English (is spreading) gradually in countries such as Singapore, or amongst elites in certain African countries. A very marked rise is evident in the use of English for occupational purposes: English is the international language of the air, and failure to use it efficiently can endanger passenger safety. English is the language increasingly of banking and industry; many international firms (based) in non-English countries (conduct) their entire operation throughout the world in English and put promotion bans on staff without the requisite degree of proficiency in it. In commerce, a Japanese salesman sent to Peru (would negotiate) the contract in English. Articles on computer technology (are written) in English by Frenchmen for Frenchmen to read. Swedish nuclear physicists (talk) professionally to each other quite naturally in English.
There is no point in asking ourselves whether some other language might not be easier to learn: the world (opts) for English, and the world (knows) what it wants, what will satisfy its needs. We can ask however what features of English are likeliest to cause difficulty to learners, especially outside continental Europe. The sound system is often found hard to master:groups of consonants clustered together as in strength; or the 20 vowels of British English - the BBC kind on news broadcasts - for more than in most other tongues. The vocabulary of English is enormous; the Full Oxford Dictionary (occupies) several feet of shelf space comprising some half a million words. An educated mother tongue speaker of English (understands) perhaps 15 to 25,000 of them; but even that figure (daunts) the foreign learner. True, the grammar uses only a modest range of word endings, but the verb system is highly complex, with formations such as he mightn't have been told; and getting the prepositions right at times baffles even the Dutch. And outside the education systems, more and more people (are attending) English classes, for instance at British Council centres in Southern Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, or at schools of English as a Foreign Language in Britain. English is a commodity people (seek) eagerly to acquire, often at great expense, for broadly sociocultural purposes: to obtain information, to converse in multinational gatherings, to travel. Nowadays, at an airport or in a hotel bar, a Korean (would address) a Kuwaiti directly in English without asking him if he (speaks) the language; some degree of command is taken for granted. And beyond the field of education the needs of banking industry trade and telecommunication often effectively establish the lingua franca for multilingual countries, for example English in Singapore.
