Awal Mula Bahasa Inggris Dijadikan Bahasa Internasional

Sekitar 100 negara di dunia, kini mengakui bahasa Inggris, sebagai bahasa utama atau kedua di
negaranya. Oleh karenanya, banyak dari kita yang kemudian belajar bahasa Inggris agar bisa mengerti
pembicaraan banyak orang di dunia. Tapi, kenapa bahasa Inggris bisa menjadi bahasa internasional?
Kenapa bukan bahasa Indonesia, Jawa, atau Minang saja ?
Tercatat terdapat 53 negara dan 10 organisasi internasional yang memakai bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa
resmi. Selain itu, hampir semua negara di dunia menerapkan Bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa kedua setelah
bahasa nasionalnya masing-masing.
Sejarah paling kuat mengungkapkan bahwa pembentukan bahasa global umumnya dipengaruhi
faktor kekuasaan. Dahulu bahasa latin-lah yang menjadi bahasa pengantar (lingua franca), meskipun
faktanya memiliki kedudukan minoritas di Kekaisaran Romawi.
Jika ditelisik dari sejarah, sejak zaman Romawi Kuno, kita menyadari diperlukannya satu bahasa umum
yang bisa dimengerti oleh banyak orang atau disebut sebagai lingua franca. Lingua Franca adalah bahasa
yang berperan sebagai pengantar yang memungkinkan orang-orang antar etnis yang berbeda
berkomunikasi satu sama lain. Dalam sejarahnya sendiri, lingua franca, sempat berganti-ganti tiap
masanya. Begitu juga dengan bahasa Inggris, yang memiliki sejarah cukup panjang untuk menjadi Lingua
Franca.
Pendeknya, dua faktor besar mempengaruhi bagaimana bahasa Inggris bisa menjadi bahasa
"internasional". Yang pertama adalah kolonialisasi Inggris. Setelah era revolusi industri, Kerajaan Inggris
menjadi negara dengan teknologi dan militer paling maju di dunia. Keadaan ini membuat Inggris menjadi
negara dengan jumlah wilayah jajahan terluas dan menjadikan bahasanya paling banyak digunakan di
dunia.
Kemudian faktornya tak hanya dari negara Inggris saja, tetapi pada awal abad ke 20, negara berbahasa
Inggris lain, yaitu Amerika Serikat, muncul sebagai negara dengan kekuatan ekonomi terbesar di dunia.
Singkatnya, kekuatan ekonomi Amerika Serikat yang sangat besar, memaksa negara-negara lain di dunia,
untuk menggunakan Dollar dan tentunya berkomunikasi dalam bahasa Inggris.
Kemudian faktanya, fenomena globalisasi juga ikut memperkokoh posisi bahasa Inggris sebagai
bahasa internasional. Pada era globalisasi, banyak perusahaan dan media asing, terutama dari Amerika
Serikat, mendirikan kantornya di negara lain. Akibatnya, banyak dari kita yang belajar bahasa Inggris
agar bisa diterima bekerja di perusahaan asing tersebut, yang tentunya menjanjikan gaji cukup besar.
Selain itu, siaran media asing berbahasa Inggris yang makin sering kita dengar dan lihat membuat kita
ikut terbiasa menggunakan bahasa Inggris.
Selain karena besarnya koloni Inggris di era penjajahan, bahasa inggris dijadikan bahasa
internasional karena merupakan salah satu bahasa tertua di dunia. bahasa inggris juga memiliki
perkembangan kosakata yang sangat pesat. Menurut tim riset para penilit di Harvard University dan
Google mencatata bahwa penambahan kosakata dalam bahasa inggris menembus 8.500 kata per tahun.
Hingga detik ini jumlahnya telah berkembang menjadi 1.022.000 kata. Perkembangan kosakata ini
menjadi salah satu patikan layak tidaknya suatu bahasa dianggap sebagai bahasa internasional. Terakhir,
bahasa inggris merupakan bahasa dari negara maju menciptakan banyak inovasi dan penyebaran ilmu
pengetahuan.
Menariknya, bahasa Inggris diprediksikan akan tetap menjadi bahasa internasional hingga
berpuluh-puluh tahun ke depan. Pada tahun 2050, India diprediksikan akan menjadi negara dengan
populasi penduduk terbanyak di dunia, mengalahkan Republik Tiongkok. Hingga kini, India menjadikan
bahasa Hindi dan Inggris sebagai bahasa resmi negaranya. Akibatnya, pengaruh negara ini ke depannya
akan ikut memperkuat bahasa Inggris sebagai bahasa internasional.
This project aims to show us why the English known as a global language and why other languages do
not have this ability. Also introduce some other languages such as Chinese that can be replaced with
English and their capability of being a global one.
Key words: english , global , language , capability.
Introduction
We all are able to communicate freely with one language to people all around the world. A single
language would help to reduce misunderstanding and miscommunication. People will need to learn this
one world language, whichever that may be, but we will also never forget older languages completely. It
means that we can use both of them at same time for the several reasons. We use our mother tongue in our
country (home town) and use second language (global language) for communicate with people that don’t
know anything about our mother tongue or for some other reason like job, travel, migration and …. .
Global language
A language is called a “global language” when it achieves the official position and education preference
in every nation, that language will finally come to be used by more people than any other language. The
essential reason to make a language global or international is the power of its people. The power includes
the power of military, politic and economic. Military power, political power and economic power are the
three essential factors to make a language global and to keep its status (Culpepper, 1997).
What does the global language do?
When a new language is introduced to new communities, and a new better life is achieved by the new
language, it makes people prefer to use the language than their own language. In turn, the low frequency
of using particular language may cause the language to disappear. This was true when English was
introduced to academic life (Kaplan, 2000). If the language is no longer the key in communication, it will
not live anymore. People will forget it.
Many factors cause to the death of the languages that cannot known as global language like War,
revolution, economic development or urbanization (Kaplan, 2000). But the development of some areas,
like aviation, tourism and banking can be help to be as a global.
English
English is universal language. It is the world's second native language, the formal language in 70
countries, and English-speaking countries are accountable for about 40% of world's total GNP. English
can be used everywhere with educated people around the world. It can be used in media, cinema, pop
music, TV and …for anyone who knows English (Bond, Michael, 1751). From Old and Middle English,
English was spoken early in the last one thousand years. Examples of language written at that time, such
as the works of Chaucer (mid to late 1300's) are useful in supervising linguistic evolution over the last
thousand years. In these works, often spellings will be indistinguishable, but once pronounced
phonetically, are understandable to modern English speakers (Sapir, Edward, 1871).
Why English is the Most Widely Used Language in the World?
1-Some people may disagree that “English is the world’s most important language.” It is definitely the
world’s most widely used language. It is spoken by a number of people 800,000,000 by a conservative
appraise 1,500,000,000 by a liberal appraise. It has official status in over 60 countries. 150 million people
use English fluently as a foreign language. English is also the language of international air traffic control,
and the principal language of world publishing, science and technology (Crystal 2001).
2- In the postcolonial world, English is often used outside the domestic area, discussions of the links
between English and Anglo culture may even seem repulsive. Speakers of English—in Britain, the United
States, and elsewhere—discussions of possible links between English and Anglo culture may also seem to
be best avoided (Quirk et al. 1985).
3- English is also important in business. 84% of companies want English as a foreign language; only 32%
require French (Felberbauer 1996). In the Austrian job market, English is pay heed to as a basic
qualification; therefore not knowing English may be a conclusive deficit. In Austrian businesses which
operate internationally the internal use of English is not so much a feature as it is in Scandinavia (Dension
1981).
According to research conducted by Stockinger, secretaries, for instance, are expected to be able to hold
telephone conversations in English while technicians have to be able to read technical literature in English
(Stockinger 1995)

Who wrote the first dictionary of the English language?

Published on 15 April 1755 and written by Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English
Language, sometimes published as Johnson's Dictionary, is among the most influential dictionaries in
the history of the English language.

There was dissatisfaction with the dictionaries of the period, so in June 1746 a group of London
booksellers contracted Johnson to write a dictionary for the sum of 1,500 guineas (£1,575), equivalent to
about £220,000 in 2018.[1] Johnson took seven years to complete the work, although he had claimed he
could finish it in three. Remarkably, he did so single-handedly, with only clerical assistance to copy the
illustrative quotations that he had marked in books. Johnson produced several revised editions during his
life.

Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 173 years later, Johnson's was viewed as
the pre-eminent English dictionary. According to Walter Jackson Bate, the Dictionary "easily ranks as
one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship, and probably the greatest ever performed by one
individual who laboured under anything like the disadvantages in a comparable length of time".[2]

In earlier times, books had been regarded with something approaching veneration, but by the mid-
eighteenth century this was no longer the case. The rise of literacy among the general public, combined
with the technical advances in the mechanics of printing and bookbinding, meant that for the first time,
books, texts, maps, pamphlets and newspapers were widely available to the general public at a reasonable
cost. Such an explosion of the printed word demanded a set pattern of grammar, definition, and spelling
for those words. This could be achieved by means of an authoritative dictionary of the English language.
In 1746, a consortium of London's most successful printers, including Robert Dodsley and Thomas
Longman – none could afford to undertake it alone – set out to satisfy and capitalise on this need by the
ever-increasing reading and writing public.
 Johnson's dictionary was not the first English dictionary, nor even among the first dozen. Over
the previous 150 years more than twenty dictionaries had been published in England, the oldest of these
being a Latin-English "wordbook" by Sir Thomas Elyot published in 1538.

The next to appear was by Richard Mulcaster, a headmaster, in 1583. Mulcaster compiled what
he termed "a generall table [of eight thousand words] we commonlie use...[yet] It were a thing verie
praise worthy...if som well learned...would gather all words which we use in the English tung...into one
dictionary..."[3]

In 1598 an Italian–English dictionary by John Florio was published. It was the first English
dictionary to use quotations ("illustrations") to give meaning to the word; surprisingly, in none of these
dictionaries so far were there any actual definitions of words. This was to change, to a small extent, in
schoolmaster Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604. Though it contained only 2,449
words, and no word beginning with the letters W, X, or Y, this was the first monolingual English
dictionary.

Several more dictionaries followed: in Latin, English, French and Italian. Benjamin Martin's
Lingua Britannica Reformata (1749) and Ainsworth's Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1737) are both
significant, in that they define entries in separate senses, or aspects, of the word. In English (among
others), John Cowell's Interpreter, a law dictionary, was published in 1607, Edward Phillips' The new
world of English words came out in 1658 and a dictionary of 40,000 words had been prepared in 1721 by
Nathan Bailey, though none was as comprehensive in breadth or style as Johnson's.

The problem with these dictionaries was that they tended to be little more than poorly organised
and poorly researched glossaries of "hard words": words that were technical, foreign, obscure or
antiquated. But perhaps the greatest single fault of these early lexicographers was, as historian Henry
Hitchings put it, that they "failed to give sufficient sense of [the English] language as it appeared in
use."[4] In that sense Dr. Johnson's dictionary was the first to comprehensively document the English
lexicon.