No Speako Inglés

Muy interesante artículo sobre la difusión del inglés como la lengua franca internacional, visto en Instapundit. Una profesora en la facultad siempre nos decía que la importancia de un idioma está directamente relacionada a la importancia de las personas que lo hablan:

WHEN its president proposed last month to ban English words like “helicopter,” “chat” and “pizza,” Iran became the latest country to try to fight the spread of English as a de facto global language.

But with interest in English around the world growing stronger, not weaker — stoked by American cultural influences and advertising, the increasing numbers of young people in developing countries and the spread of the Internet, among other factors — there are some linguists and others who say: why fight it? Instead, the argument goes, English, particularly the simpler form of the language used by most nonnative speakers, should be embraced.

“It’s a lost cause to try to fight against the tide,” said Jacques Lévy, who studies globalism at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and is a native French-speaker. English, he added, is just the latest in a line of global tongues. “It could have been another language; it was Greek, then Latin, French, now it is English.”