The topic of the talk is «Don’t insist on English» and the speaker’s name
is Patricia Ryan. The video was filmed in December 2010 at TEDxDubai. In her
talk, she asks a provocative question: Is the world's focus on English
preventing the spread of great ideas in other languages?
Patricia Ryan talks about language loss and the globalization of English.
She tells us that it is important to be able to communicate across generations
and to get much knowledge of older family members, for example. Ryan points out
that a language dies every 14 days and English is the undisputed global
language at the same time. She has seen a lot of changes in her career as a
English teacher in foreign countries. The major change that she have seen was
how teaching English has morphed from being a mutually beneficial practice to
becoming a massive business that it is today. Patricia could literally see how
it changed. She also tell us about a test one has to pass if you are not a
native speaker but you want to study in the U.K. or in the U.S. Ryan mentions
that English teachers are the gatekeepers; you have to satisfy them first
before you can go on. She thinks that „it can be dangerous to give too much
power to a narrow segment of society.“ She is against using English as a
barrier and tells that we need more than 600 languages and the main one being
English, (or Chinese). Millions and millions of students take these tests every
year and have to pay a fee for that. But they are prohibitive to so many
millions of poor people. Patricia Ryan also points out that people focus on
English because they want to give their children the best chance in life and to
do that, they need a so called „Western education“. Later she talks a little
bit about cooperation between languages and that we can achieve and learn so
much more if we do pay also attention to other languages in addition to
English. „When a language dies, we don’t know what we lose with that language.“
Her last words of her talk are: „Let us celebrate diversity. Mind your
language. Use it to spread great ideas.“
I chose this specific talk because I think that language is a very
interesting topic, it is a big part of everyone’s culture and therefor an issue
worth talking about.
I believe that language is a part of everybody and we have to appreciate it
as often as we can. Surely, English is a really important world language and it
is also useful in business and career life. But learning other languages
besides English and being proud of his own one has also good advantages.
Most interesting aspect for me is that every 14 days a language, which is
spoken somewhere on our great earth, dies. I cannot imagine that my own
language will not exist longer one day.
Esteem your mother tongue but also don’t forget that English is a global
languages which accompanies us every single day.
LINK TO THE TALK
