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| Friday, 9 April 2004 |
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English spreads through central Europe as ex-communist states join EU by Jean-Luc Testault PRAGUE (AFP) German was the language spoken throughout central Europe until World War II after which communism came and it made way for Russian, but today everybody in the region wants to speak English. Prague, a city of 1.4 million people, has no less than 140 private language schools that offer mainly English classes. On buses and trains in the Czech capital, commuters on their way to and from work often have English textbooks open in their laps, snatching a moment to study vocabulary or learn their tenses. The result can be heard everywhere - in shops, cafes, restaurants, banks and bars, people are speaking the language of Shakespeare and Britney Spears. Even if you call for a taxi, the switchboard is likely to be operated by somebody fluent in English. All of this has happened in the 15 years since the Iron Curtain fell. In 1989 Czechs "had scant knowledge of English," said Irena Dominikova, the head of the British Bell School for languages which opened in Prague in 1990. "Many of the communist dissidents taught themselves English by reading books and newspapers but they did not have communication skills," she told AFP. Russian, which was obligatory under communist rule, disappeared almost as quickly as the communist regimes in the region fell in 1989. In the Czech Republic and Hungary, Russian has all but disappeared from high school curricula. In the former Yugoslav state of Slovenia only 1.4 percent of high schools still teach Russian and in Poland, where one in three high schools offered Russian in 1992, the figure now stands at 10 percent. The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia with their large Russian populations are the only exceptions to the new trend. "English has become the world's dominant language, in the way that French used to be. It is the language of economic globalisation and international organisations, and it is logical that it will take root in central Europe, just as it did in Western Europe," said Hans Juergen Krumm, a language lecturer at the University of Vienna, who lead a study into foreign language teaching in central Europe. Nobody is more eager to learn English than the youth, for whom it is a symbol of the West, a way in to American culture and the language of the multinational companies that have revived the region's economy in recent years. Instead of asking for a salary increase, some employees have asked companies to pay for English courses, who consider it to be a sound investment. But Dominikova says in spite of this eagerness to learn "the level of English spoken in the Czech Republic is still not very good." During the transition to democracy, she said, many qualified English teachers left to work in the private sector because it was more lucrative. At the same time many a Russian teacher rapidly switched to English to cash in on the trend. This shortage of good English teachers led to a short-lived increase in the number of people seeking to learn German. This quickly came to an end as English tutors poured in, though German remains firmly entrenched in the region as its second foreign language, as a result of the proximity to Germany and Austria. But English is today far more widely taught at school than German, according to statistics from education ministries in the region. The number of students learning the language varies between 50 and 80 percent. French however remains a marginal language in Central Europe, except for Romania and to a smaller extent Bulgaria, two countries that are due to join the EU in 2007. |
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