Or, for that matter, French or Portuguese? Which country does French belong to? The answer seems obvious: France! But there are about four times as many French speakers outside of France as there are inside it. Who owns Portuguese? Now, you're probably hesitant to blurt out "Portugal", remembering that Brazil's population is about 20 times that of Portugal. Maybe the Portuguese language belongs to them in half? But another 70 million people live in African countries, in which Portuguese is the official language. Perhaps it is also their language?
The British cannot entertain the illusion that the language of the same name belongs exclusively to them. The "small affairs" of other nations in the British Isles and the superpowers across the Atlantic clearly show that this is "jointly acquired property." But these countries – along with Canada, Australia and other English-speaking peoples – must at some point come to terms with the fact that, even collectively, their language no longer belongs to them; Of the approximately one billion people who speak English, less than half live in these major English-speaking countries.
The proportion of English speakers born outside the traditional Anglosphere is growing every day. Perhaps 40% of people in the EU speak English, that's about 180 million people – significantly more than the populations of the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand combined. In India, it is more difficult to calculate the number of speakers, but the numbers range from 60 to 200 million, and even with an upward trend; Most of these estimates make it the second largest English-speaking country in India. World.
English-speaking people are proud of the spread of their language and often attribute this to the liberal policy of openness, thanks to which it easily and readily absorbs words from all over the world. However, in the coming century, English will do more than just borrow words. In non-English-speaking countries, it becomes not just a useful second language, facilitating communication and removing barriers, but a native language. Today you can easily find children and adolescents in Northern Europe, who speak as if they are from Kansas or Arizona. This is a natural consequence of childhood against the background of complete immersion in films and animated films with subtitles, international TV and streaming services in English, not to mention music, games and social networks.
Today, many students still aspire to American or British standards. The textbooks teach English-speaking Indians to avoid fixed Indian expressions such as "What's your good name?" by replacing them with the universal "What's your name?" having a stable significance in their languages, during conversations or in the course of correspondence in English.
However, as hundreds of millions of new native speakers master English, they will be less interested in sounding like British or American. A generation of postcolonial writers mixed native words and phrases in their English prose without translation, italics, or explanations. Academic movements , such as "English as a lingua franca" (ELF), develop an ideology, according to which native speakers should simply ignore British or American norms.
So, in place of European countries using American or British English, Southern European English, Scandinavian English and even Danube English may appear - what can we say about Asian or African countries?
After a sufficient amount of time, new generations of native speakers contribute not only words to the language they are studying, but also their own grammar, which from the point of view of older speakers is nothing more than a distortion of it. But with the passage of time, the number of people who think so will naturally decrease, and the new language norm formed by young people will become the standard for new generations - until they overthrow the previous generation of lingua revolutionaries.
For those who are uncomfortable with this, it is time to remember that this material is written in a distorted version of the Church Slavonic language that has undergone a multi-stage "modernization", which, in turn, goes back to Proto-Slavic. This linguistic genesis occurred under the influence of the invasions of the Polovtsians, Mongols, Pechenegs, the corrupting influence from the West, South and East. It is the same with modern English: it is nothing more than a generation of Anglo-Saxon, poorly studied by waves of Celts, Vikings, Normans and other conquerors - until it has changed beyond recognition.
One should take comfort in the fact that such changes usually occur too slowly to be noticeable over the course of a single person's lifetime. In addition, written speech is less susceptible to change compared to colloquial, it is a kind of stabilizing factor. But if the language develops continuously (even to the formation of new clichés), adaptation becomes deeper and more complete if it occurs against the background of the emergence of new speakers who came from other language spaces.
It is only known for certain that no language has yet reached a greater number of speakers than English. It's hard to predict how they'll change it, but it's easy to rule out that they won't change it at all. After all, by that time he will already be their language too.
