Advertising and Broadcasting

Mass publication Brevity (speed) Commercial television Change brought by the Internet BBC (British Broadcasting Company /

Corporation) II WW (> Radio Londra) Ads in Italy (2008) from Levi’s: 1 2 3

Cinema

Preceding I WW growth of European film industry > passed to America

Late 1920s SOUND English-language movies still

dominate (85% of film market) Oscars, Film Festivals Wim Wenders (100) Italy and dubbing

Popular Music

Many people make their first contact with English this way

19th century > dance halls, beer halls, popular theatres

Vaudeville Light opera 1920s operetta Musical

Popular Music

Mass-produced gramophone records Jazz Bill Haley and the Comets (“Rock around

the clock”); Elvis in the USA Beatles and Rolling Stones in the UK ABBA Swedish group singing in English Bob Dylan, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Joan

Baez > symbol of freedom, rebellion and modernism

International travel

Business trips, holidays, religious pilgrimages, sports, military interventions.

shop signs> restaurant menus> credit card facilities> road signs> safety instructions> public transportatione.g. Turin 2006 Winter Olympics

International safety

English as a means of controlling international transport operations devising systems of unambiguous communication

1950s: Airspeak> International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) standard for airborne nations

1980: Seaspeak> essential English for international maritime use in seafaring nations

1994: Emergencyspeak> standardizing communication between the UK and the rest of Europe via the Channel (the Chunnel)

International air traffic control

Arguments in favour Arguments against

Not all pilots have a good command of English

Safer to use a language both the pilot and the air controller know well

Education

the role of English in education is central in order to grant access to knowledge

P. 111 > Sri Lanka

> 70 - 80 % of academic journals are published in English throughout the world> a person is more likely to be in touch with the latest thinking and research by learning English

1960s: English as the medium of higher education (courses completely in English)

English Language Teaching (ELT) business English 2000: a British Council project

> 2000: over 1 billion EFL learners

Communications

postal system, telephone, electronic networks

USA: ½ of the world’s total postal traffic volume in 2002

80 % of the world’s electronically stored information is in English

1960s: ARPANET(Advanced Research Project Agency Network)

Late 70s Usenet

The Internet was formally proposed in 1972; > first International Conference on Computer Communications.

Scientists from Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Sweden, Great Britain and the United States agreed that protocols to link together computer networks in various countries were needed.

A couple of years later the TCP/IP code was ready. In the best hacker tradition, as Rowland puts it, the protocol was immediately made available for anyone, free of charge.

In 1992 the World Wide Web (WWW) was released by CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) created by Tim Berners-Lee, first designed to distribute electronically software and documentation among physicists working in different universities and institutes all over the world.

A new coordination organization was also formed, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

http://info.cern.ch/www20/

Internet

Internet

1980s: Internet >private business and users

World Wide Web (WWW) data transmission protocols in ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) code have been devised for English

English as the lingua franca of the Internet

http://www.unicode.org/ “Digital divide” does that include

language?

Hackers

http://www.mithral.com/~beberg/manifesto.html (video)

Film: War Games

The right place at the right time

17th and 18th century: the language of the leading colonial nation (Britain)

18th and 19th century: the language of the leading nation of industrial revolution (Britain)

19th and 20th century: the language of the leading economic power (USA)

20th and 21st century: the leading language of international, political, academic, and community meetings