Worldwide English – Is It Different From Local English?
Worldwide English (countable and uncountable as the spelling denotes) is everybody’s language, spoken not only by individuals on each continent, but by everybody on every ocean in between. In American English, the term globalization is used: to signify the tendency of all languages, cultures and nations to communicate. In British English, global means more generally: to deal with the wide variety of cultural phenomena that affect a nation as a whole. But worldwide English may also be simply called the common language of the entire world or the worldwide English-reading world.
Worldwide English is used everywhere, not just in America or Britain, but in China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Philippines and, of course, China itself. It is a language used all over the world because it is spoken there, too. The majority of inhabitants in any nation speak some form of English. Some are more fluent than others. But even if a person does not know or speak English very well, he or she can still communicate comfortably with most people around the globe, if they use an effective English translation program. Such a program will take a document written in one language and translate it into a document written in another language.
A good English translation program will take a sentence written in English and make it into a sentence that anyone in the world could understand. It will do this without losing any of its meaning or its original phonetic sound. That is, it will produce a document that anyone reading would perceive to be an actual language, even though it was translated using a completely different spelling, grammar or alphabet. An authentic English translation must be free from any mistranslation.
Why has global English become so necessary? Well, to understand why it has become necessary, we need to look beyond the literal meaning of the phrase: ‘English is the global language’. Global English is actually a linguistic construct that refers to the fact that English is spoken universally by human beings from around the world. As long as people speak English, everyone around the globe will be able to understand it.
However, when people from different countries speak English differently–for example by having different accents or using colloquialisms that differ from one country to another–the meaning of that phrase changes. For instance, an English speaker in India who lives in Britain would not necessarily use the word ‘Britain’ to refer to a British county. Rather, that speaker might instead use the word ‘India’ or ‘Lanka’.
There is no such thing as an international English language; rather, there are several local languages that human beings from different corners of the earth use to communicate with each other. Each of these local languages is local to that particular language’s geographical location. As long as those languages continue to be used as international languages, English will remain universal. However, until that day arrives, it is still sensible to use an English translation program whenever you travel to a foreign country and encounter someone using the language you do not know.