Assets and Liabilities

Because English occupies such a prominent place in international communication, it is worth pausing to consider some of the features that figure prominently in learning English as a foreign language. Depending on many variables in the background of the learner, some of these features may facilitate the learning of English, and others may make the effort more difficult. All languages are adequate for the needs of their culture, and we may assume without argument that English shares with the other major languages of Europe the ability to express the multiplicity of ideas and the refinements of thought that demand expression in our modern civilization. The question is rather one of simplicity. How readily can English be learned by the non-native speaker? Does it possess characteristics of vocabulary and grammar that render it easy or difftcult to acquire? To attain a completely objective view of one’s own language is no simple matter. It is easy to assume that what we in infancy acquired without sensible difficulty will seem equally simple to those attempting to learn it in maturity. For most of us, learning any second language requires some effort, and some languages seem harder than others. The most obvious point to remember is that among the many variables in the difficulty of learning a language as an adult, perhaps the most important is the closeness of the speaker’s native language to the language that is being learned. All else equal, including the linguistic skill of the individual learner, English will seem easier to a native speaker of Dutch than to a native speaker of Korean.

Linguists are far from certain how to measure complexity in a language. Even after individual features have been recognized as relatively easy or difficult to learn, the weighting of these features within a single language varies according to the theoretical framework assumed. In an influential modern theory of language, the determination of the difficulty of specific linguistic structures falls within the study of “markedness,” which in turn is an important part of “universal grammar,” the abstract linguistic principles that are innate for all humans. By this view, the grammar of a language consists of a “core,” the general principles of the grammar, and a “periphery,” the more marked structures that result from historical development, borrowing, and other processes that produce “parameters” with different values in different languages.

 

One may think that the loss of many inflections in English, as discussed in $ 10, simplifies the language and makes it easier for the learner. However, if a result of the loss of inflections is an increase in the markedness of larger syntactic structures, then it is uncertain whether the net result increases or decreases complexity.

It is important to emphasize that none of the features that we are considering here has had anything to do with bringing about the prominence of English as a global language. The ethnographic, political, economic, technological, scientific, and cultural forces discussed above have determined the international status of English, which would be the same even if the language had had a much smaller lexicon and eight inflectional cases for nouns, as Indo-European did. The inflections of Latin did nothing to slow its spread when the Roman legions made it the world language that it was for several centuries.