Edition # 7 -Universally English By Nikhil Nair BE-CE

Universally English
By Nikhil Nair BE-CE

Every nation has its own customs, currency and language. When it comes to customs, or currency for any exchange there has to be an understood and accepted norm. This applies to language as well. When different countries come together for a cause or a purpose they must communicate on the same platform. Arising out of the need for a global language, English has become that language because of its popularity.
English is universal in its nature because of the influence of the countries that speak it. America has the largest influence; therefore it comes as no surprise that American English is popular. If you want to communicate on a global scale, you have to stick to English. If you want to be guaranteed large readership, your books must be in English, or at least translated into English. The internet is largely in English, and those sites that are not in English, can be translated into it. The most popular cinema industry has movies in English. Amazing movies like Life is Beautiful was dubbed into English so that a larger audience may be moved by its simple but well told story. The idea is clear, if you want the world to know, it must be in English. Even old literary work like the Panchatantra was translated from Sanskrit to English.
Among us engineers, for those who deal with writing computer programs, syntax is inspired by English. Our loops, our conditional statements are all based on English. The Do- While syntax which is used to run a set of instructions repetitively while a condition is true, is basically English. We do have syntax in Chinese, Hindi and other languages, but they have not gained popularity.
Other languages are not inferior. They are just concentrated to their regions. Sardar Patel had said that it was a mistake to segregate India on the basis of language. But it was done anyway. Thus today we find that wonderful languages like Malayalam, Marathi etc remain secluded and left for only some people to understand. While English spread far and wide.
We could try to create a new order, but to what purpose? English is performing its job as a means for communication very well. If there is any language that has functionally more advantages than English today, by all means change it to that. But as things stand today there is no such need.