Official Language

Have you ever wondered how humans would communicate without using languages? Maybe one in a thousand ways is by gestures where both parties can understand. Human may not understand each other when they are communicating in different languages - it is as if a "barking dog were trying to chirp to a bird". As a solution, over time and years as civilizations rise and falls, human strive to master common languages that could be understood by all. It seems that in recent years, English has emerged as one of the most widely used and is similar to universal language. Thus, should English be the official language? This issue had caught the attention of the world as a portion of people disagree because acknowledging English as the official language may put enormous pressure on those who do not speak English and translation machine would elucidate this issue. Nonetheless, English does not only play an important role in the first world countries, but is also acknowledged to have special status in more than 70 countries and moreover, English obtained its global status.

The idea of self-esteem on those who do not speak English rose (Kemper 1999); therefore, she concluded that English should not be the lingua franca. As addition, the feeling of embarrassment towards the English users would linger in non-English speakers and would eventually avoid in using English. Consequently, this will lead to a longer term impact of polarized English users and non-English users. Chances are that English users will be getting even better in English while those stay away from English will end up completely ignoring English. Such case often happens in universities, where by students would normally group up based on the tongue language and the groups circuitously create their own language identity. An alternative view that explains the unnecessary for English to be the universal language as translation machine will work more efficiently (Jukka, 1995). It will have adequate quality and pace, which a person can chat and speak through this machine. It would not be surprising if the machine could even translate an essay without grammatical errors and it would be efficient enough for fluent communication between English users and non-users.

In evaluating this issue, I must acknowledge that these contradictory responds are not inherently unrealistic and misguided; it is just the possibilities that are not become aware of. If we are to observe the world today, non-English users are not shunning the language and instead are frantically learning the English language. In fact, they are encouraged through the rise of increasingly sophisticated translation websites and engines such as "Babel fish" and "Google". These engines give hope for them to tighten the gap and to catch up with English as it were extensively used. Therefore, why make them feel forced in learning the language when they are already trying to grasp it?

As a matter of fact, English is well established in economic-giant countries. Doubtlessly for countries like United States, Australia, and Great Britain, where English is their native language, uses English in almost every aspect. The case is different for other countries with non-English as native language. Ironically, Japan; a superstitious and highly cultured country, adopted English for science in the past half decades. As a result, Japan had been more competitive in science and is third in scientific ranking after United States and the European Union (Lee 2005). Japan is also predicted to lead in nanotechnology and robotic for the coming decade (Lee 2005). Additionally, Korea and China is jumping in the same bandwagon as well and their local universities are slowly shifting towards English. As a consequence, most science creation takes place in the English medium.

Besides, in most of the