English developing fast

Sarath Malalasekera

Live languages like Sinhala, Tamil or English keep on changing. Pali, Sanskrit or Latin are called dead languages as they don’t change. Scholars study dead languages to read ancient writings in these languages. said Legal Aid Commission (LAC) Chairman S. S. Wijeratne.

Wijeratne emphasised English is considered the fastest developing language in the world. English is spoken in all 192 countries of the United Nations. There is no subject ranging from arbitration to zoology, physics to rocket science that is beyond the reach of English over 90 percent cyber space usage is dominated by English. The language of the globalization of trade is also English. The future of the world lies on English.

Due to its wide usage, English is also the language with the most number of variants and accents in the world. The day, any linguistic group using English veers out off the basic rules of English usage completely, the language the group users will not known as English but pidgin.

If one generation of pidgin users bestows its linguistic habits on the next generation it is referred to as Creole. Pidgin and Creole could be understood by other pidgin users and not by the standard English user. Pidgin has replaced standard English in a number of countries where English or French was once the dominant language. All pidgin users will always insist that their language is English. But sadly cannot be understood by English users in other countries, he added.

The LAC Chairman said the 2009 was declared the year of English and information technology in Sri Lanka.

The efforts made by the presidential task force to promote the twin subjects are commendable. But somewhere down the road the vision has somewhat blurred. As it is reported of the 21,000 English teachers in 19,000 are only with credit passes in English at GCE Ordinary Level.

This qualification is hardly adequate to teach English as a second language. The appropriate corrective step would be to establish a separate English teaching university to train diploma holders in teaching English as a second language and conduct research in teaching English as second language.