English, The Language You Want As Your Best Buddy

One neat thing about being humans is that we have language, something that allows us to engage in complex discussions like “why Samsung S7 Edge is perhaps currently the best phone in the world” or to efficiently do tasks like order a Meat Lover’s pizza with stuffed crust and lots of cheese, please.

Samsung S7 With Pizza Casing - Because You're Worth It

Now, according to Google, the language spoken by the most people in the world is actually… CHINESE. Well, this is owing to the fact that China has the largest population in the world, with more than 1 billion native Chinese speakers. And if you think that the wonderful language of ENGLISH must be next, you would be wrong. SPANISH is actually the second most widely spoken language 400 million speakers, with English following closely in third place with 335 million speakers.

Surprise, surprise.

So… does that mean that we’ve all made a mistake and now have to learn Mandarin and Spanish instead or else we are doomed? Well, not really. If you’ve only learned English as your second or foreign language, don’t fret, you’re on the right track.

What;s pretty amazing is that while we all know that English is the current global language, it was never really officially assigned that status. There was never an international body of linguists coming together and declaring English to be THE global language. It, very simply, just became that. People suddenly decided they were going to use English as the main language in all sorts of important fields, medicine, technology, computer science, art, engineering, and then suddenly, English was everywhere.

See, English didn’t gain that status because it was the most spoken language in the world, but because it was the language with the most people who wanted to use it. Everybody wants to speak English. 

Well, okay, maybe not everybody, but look at how many people now do speak English (or try to) on the social media?

Case in point: Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg and Marzia Bisognin, are super famous on YouTube as Pewdiepie and CutiePieMarzia with both of them having millions of subscribers (approximately 43M and 6M subscribers). While they both speak English in virtually all their videos on YouTube, Felix is Swedish and Marzia is Italian!! …the exclamation marks were actually kind of redundant because it’s pretty obvious from their amazing names (Pewds’ is insanely awesome). They clearly do speak a little Swedish and Italian from time to time, but in their videos that are watched by the entire world, they preferred to use English.

This is also very much the case for how many people treat English nowadays, speak your own language when talking to your own people, and speak English when talking to the rest of the world. Various Institutions and companies around the world have accordingly adopted the same stance when it comes to the international crowd: Come join us, but only if you speak English – that is, if you have an IELTS or TOEFL IBT score (duh!).

English, although DEFINITELY not a perfect language, has truly become the language to bridge people and cultures all over the world.

If you wish to follow the footsteps of Felix and Marzia and start a successful YouTube channel, or if you’re interested in studying or working somewhere in the world, or if you have absolutely nothing else to do, why not learn this wonderful language? Then after that you can worry about your crappy Mandarin.