Why is English the overwhelmingly dominant worldwide language.
In Google I found two excellent explanations shown below.
Explanation 1: English is said to be easy at first because it has shed a lot of the grammar that other European languages retain to some degree or another i.e. gender, cases (mainly), adjective endings, irregular plurals (again mainly).
It also doesn’t have loads of different verbs forms.
This makes it easier to get going and speak English reasonably well. However how hard is it to master English compared to other languages is a matter of some debate.
Some say it is relatively hard, others say languages are equally difficult to perfect and others say English is still comparatively easy at this level.
Explanation 2: I know colloquial English and it’s a relatively very easy language even for people whose native languages are outside it’s language group. In English, the only hard thing is the pronunciation.*
Yes, the grammar is not easy, but there are no languages with easy grammar.
So that’s why I’m saying relatively easy. Grammar exceptions? Guys all the languages have those. And this is the reason it’s the most popular language. Because it’s pretty easy to master.
If it was a hard-to-learn language, it’s popularity would have remained rather insignificant
Only 500 years ago English was a rather primitive language.
As England rose to dominance primitive English imported thousands of foreign words.
Today English contains over 600,000 words whereas the only other language that contains even 100,000 words is German (@200,000).
English pronunciation is messy because imported words spelling was never Anglicized.
Theodore Theodorsen
Manhasset
