A Global Language?

A friend of mine is applying to several universities in the Netherlands, and she informed me that she has to take English as a second language because she is not a UK or US citizen. At first I started joking about it, telling her that at least she knows she will be doing well in the classes. However, after giving it a little more that fifteen seconds to settle in, I had a full on reaction. Aina de Guia Eriksson is born in Sweden. Her mother is from the Philippines, and her father is from Sweden. Her life is spread out in Asia and Europe – she has several places she can call home. She is trilingual. She speaks English, Swedish and Tagalog (oh, and a little bit of French, and a lot of Spanish). Her strongest language is English. She studied English at Higher Level through an International Baccalaureate course. She did not only study the course, she was one of the best in her class. Her English is good, better, best. She can write a sentence so complicated, you will not even care that you do not know what it means, you will simply stare in awe at the complexity, and fall in love with the sentence structure.

She holds a Swedish and a Filipino passport. So she is not a UK or US citizen. But her English is probably of much better quality than more than half of those citizens. And still she has to take English as a second language. Since when did those two countries have monopoly on English? If globalization is for real, then people need to wake up and realize that English is global – there are so many different dialects that nobody can claim ownership anymore. Several countries have English as their official language - all lessons at schools are held in English, it  is the official office language etc. Whether this is a positive or negative thing is a different discussion - but it is a fact. So maybe those universities need to start adding nationalities like Ugandan and Filipino to their list, because that is the reality of today. 

Peace