HOW MUCH “GLOBAL” AND GUIDED IS ENGLISH IN THE MODERN WORLD?

Abstract

The article deals with key features of so called “Global English” from the point of view of its linguistic nature, prerequisites of its emergence, communicative role, its relation to language policy and transnational and transcontinental influence on national languages. In doing so, the author brings into confrontation two extreme interpretations of this problem in the most well-known foreign scholars’ works. According to the first of them English in the modern world is defined as a “language that everyone needs and that everyone should learn”. It has become a kind of lingua nullius, gathering worldwide scope according to its own rules and laws, unguided, not directed by any external forces. According to the second interpretation Global English is a product of the leading English speaking powers’ purposeful colonial and neocolonial language policy, aimed at taking key social positions by English supplanting national languages. The author of the article shares generalideas of the second interpretation with certain reservations and cites a detailed reasoning in favour of it.