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English is everywhere on the internet.

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English is everywhere on the internet.

I think we are seeing the effects of this

and we're taking our social cues from sort of an Anglo-centric part of the world.

I love watching films and not everything is translated to Thai.

So understanding English helps me enjoy them fully.

I started learning English at school because I wanted to open up for myself lots of opportunities and study abroad.

Hey, it's Hannah here and this is What in the World,

your podcast for the stories that get people talking from the BBC World Service.

In this episode, we're speaking about one of my favourite things, languages.

English, as you've probably guessed,

is the most widely spoken language in the world.

There are millions of people who learn it at school and as adults too.

But have you ever wondered how English became so dominant in the first place and what impact does that have on AI,

internet culture and other smaller languages.

And here to chat us through this is Georgie Thorman from BBC Learning English.

That's the part of the BBC that helps millions of people around the world improve their English.

Hello, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, Hannah.

Thank you.

I'm excited to be here.

So English is the most widely spoken language.

Just how many people speak it globally?

Hundreds of millions of people around the world.

In fact, 1.5 billion people speak English.

And what's interesting is that only 400 million of those,

or around 25% of those,

are native speakers, which makes it distinct from other languages,

because if you compare that to the second most spoken language,

Mandarin Chinese, with 1.1 billion speakers,

the vast majority of those are native speakers.

So people, hundreds of millions of people are learning English as either a second or foreign language.

So how did English become the most widely spoken language in the world?

For a variety of reasons.

So one of those being colonisation.

So for about 400 years,

Britain had an empire, which meant that English spread to many parts of the world

and was the main language used for things like government,

education, trade, things like that.

And when countries gained their independence,

many of them kept English as an official language,

which is why we have varieties like Indian English,

Nigerian English and American English.

another factor was the rise of the USA as a global superpower so after the world wars

the USA became the world's largest economy it also became a leader in things like the entertainment industry

so Hollywood lots of us were watching movies in English it also became a leader in the tech industry

so we're all using Google,

Apple, Microsoft and other tech giants And then after that,

it kind of became the language of business, diplomacy, even academia.

We're going to get more on to English in tech in just a bit,

but you mentioned some of the different variations of English and how it has transformed American English, Indian English.

There's hybrid languages like Spanglish,

which is Spanish and English,

and that's massive in the States.

And of course, there are so many different regional variations here in the UK.

How do languages evolve to develop these different variations, dialects?

So accent and dialect variation happens when concentrations of people are talking in a certain way in a particular area.

So if we look outside of the UK to ex-colonies like India,

where one of the official languages is English,

their English variety, Indian English,

is heavily influenced by the local languages in the area.

So again, Indian English has very distinct pronunciation features.

It has some of its own vocabulary and the exchange goes both ways.

So some words from Indian languages have kind of seeped into a more global English,

which is why we have words like pyjamas and bungalow.

So English is just a big patchwork quilt of diversity.

And I read about Hinglish,

Benglish and Tanglish as well,

different variations mixed with Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.

Yes, so hybrid languages.

These are more of a mix of the language.

How common is it for English to be taught in schools around the world as well?

Yeah, so English is definitely the most studied foreign language around the world.

In Europe, for example, almost all of the schools have English as a mandatory core subject in primary and secondary school.

So across the world in terms of English being the main language of instruction,

it's harder to find stats.

But in the ex-colonies where English is an official language,

many of these countries will have English as the main language for not only English,

but the core subjects like math, science, history.

That will be the main language of instruction.

Georgie, thanks so much.

Thank you.

And we've also been hearing from some of you about why you chose to learn English.

Hi guys, my name is Kaziza and I'm from Kazakhstan.

I started learning English at school because I wanted to open up for myself lots of opportunities and study abroad.

English actually made it happen.

I'm currently residing and studying in Japan using English on a daily basis to communicate with people from around the world.

Hi everyone, I'm Jin from Thailand.

The reason why I learn English is because it's opened up the world to me.

I love watching films and not everything is translated to Thai.

So understanding English helps me enjoy them fully and feel closer to the world outside Thailand.

My name is Marcos and I'm from Paraguay.

I chose to learn English because I wanted to travel the world.

I knew that English serves as a rich language,

which allows you to communicate with people from different nationalities and cultures.

Hey there, I'm Fatma Binteomer from Pakistan.

You know, English started as just another subject at school.

But then I realised it is actually a passport to my dreams.

Because of English, I made it to the London School of Economics.

And now I can connect,

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learn and dream without borders.

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Now let's find out how English has shaped the internet and AI,

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artificial intelligence, and what the future might look like.

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I'm speaking to Linda Heimersdottir.

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Hi, Linda.

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Hi.

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Nice to be with you.

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Really nice to have you.

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So you're a linguist.

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You work for an AI company in Iceland,

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which is, of course, in Europe,

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and you know all about the technical side of languages and AI.

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Why is English the most used language online?

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Yeah, that's an excellent question.

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I would say some of the reasons are historical.

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So the early development of the Internet happened mostly in the US in the UK.

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So you could say that it happened early that English became established as sort of the default language of communication online.

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Then, of course, we have a very English-centric tech sector.

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So we have a lot of big tech companies that prefer English.

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But of course, maybe the main reason is that English is our lingua franca.

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So about a quarter of the world's population speaks English.

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So if you have a message and you want to be able to reach the largest possible audience,

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then you might want to choose English as your language to convey that.

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And talking of AI, it's trained on vast amounts of information from the internet,

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as you've said that most of the language on the internet is in English.

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Does that mean that AI works best in English?

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

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That's not to say that you cannot use it perfectly adequately in other languages than English.

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But when you're using AI in,

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let's say, Icelandic, you certainly have to be more thoughtful about how you're using the models.

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You have to be more critical of the output.

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And it's not just a matter of the language either.

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There's a cultural aspect to this.

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So AI models, they might often default to an Anglo-centric view of the world

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and they won't be as knowledgeable about the history and culture of smaller language areas.

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And how are AI and translation apps changing how English is used online and also offline?

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Yeah, that's an interesting question.

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So, of course, we are surrounded online by English and we live a lot of our life online as it is.

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And nowadays we use AI a lot in our schoolwork and in the workplace,

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for example, to make our lives easier,

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to make our work more efficient, et cetera.

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So of course we want to do that in the best way possible.

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So people might tend to use these tools in English rather than chancing a worse outcome

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if they do it in their own language.

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But there are also opportunities there, right?

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Because language technology for a lot of languages,

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including Icelandic, has taken a huge leap forward because of these models that are so powerful.

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So we are now able to do a lot of things with technology in our own language

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that we weren't able to do just a few years ago

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and you mentioned translation so that's one sort of application

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that has become a lot more powerful and that could of course mean

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that people may no longer need to use english as the lingua franca as a common denominator

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if they're able to speak to each other directly

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and instantly using ai using these translation apps which are just getting better and better and what What about internet culture,

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things like memes?

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Is there any evidence that English media is also taking over in different countries and cultures as well?

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Oh, absolutely.

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Yeah.

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I mean, when you think back just a few decades,

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I mean, I grew up in the 90s and I definitely watched a lot of American television and movies.

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But when it came to sort of current cultural phenomena,

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I was getting my information from magazines and newspapers in Icelandic and the radio,

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etc. And nowadays everything happens online.

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So sort of young people's cultural awareness comes a lot more from the Internet than any other place.

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And again, because English is everywhere on the Internet,

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I think we are seeing the effects of this.

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So sort of American culture is penetrating our lives in many different ways.

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And we're taking our social cues from sort of an Anglo-centric part of the world,

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you could say.

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We can also worry a little bit about other aspects.

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So if a language starts losing ground to another language in certain domains of society,

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that's something that we need to look at.

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There is this term that has been coined,

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digital language death, which is used to describe when a language becomes irrelevant in the digital domain,

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you stop being able to use it to converse with technology.

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And that is something that we need to consider

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but we don't really know what that means

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and what kind of an effect that has on the language as a whole

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because we're just so early into this AI boom and this truly kind of technical age that we are living in.

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Linda, great speaking to you.

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Thank you.

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Thank you.

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That's it from me, but I am keen to hear from you.

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We know that loads of you use What in the World to practice your English

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and hopefully you're big fans of BBC Learning English too.

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So get in touch with us,

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drop us a comment below.

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We're also on Instagram at BBC What in the World and we're on WhatsApp.

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I'm Hannah.

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This is What in the World from the BBC World Service and we'll see you next time.

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