hi everybody!
why English stands as an international language? is that because of they rule many countries countries of the world or something else?
Because the most powerful country of the last 100 years and the most powerful of the 100 before that both use English as their first language. I expect within the next 100 or so that English may be supplanted by Mandarin or Cantonese as the international lingua franca.
I also expect that someone else will be along shortly to expand on this answer.
It started with the British Empire, which spread English to many parts of Asia and Africa. In some multilingual countries English became the only language that most of the population knew.
The political and economic power of the U.S. also helped English become an international language. Many people learned English to help themselves do business with U.S. companies.
In a lot of places that used to be British colonies, English is the “neutral” language. Two people from different tribes or groups may not speak each other’s language - or they may not WANT to - but they can use English as a third-party tongue they both understand. The reasons Jeff gives are also good.
I doubt it. While more total people speak Chinese than English, they’re all concentrated in China. English speakers are spread all over the world. Not just in the countries that use it primarily (USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica, etc.), but also in countries like India, Singapore, Malaysia, and many parts of Africa, where it is firmly entrenched as a secondary language, sometimes officially. It is an official language in Singapore, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone (among other countries) for example.
It not just that a lot of people speak English. It’s that people speak English on a regular almost literally everywhere in the world.
It was spread to the world by the British, of course. The natives kept using it when the British shoved off because it came in handy. India originally planned to do away with the English language entirely after they gained independence from the UK. It didn’t work. In a country with so many languages, a lingua franca is very useful. Many of the African countries kept it around for the same reason.
Hi, Najee_online. Welcome back.
Britain used to have a large overseas empire, but no longer does. It still has a handful of small colonies, but by and large the former colonies like Canada, India, etc. are independent, self-governing countries. Many of them still belong to the Commonwealth, but that is a purely voluntary association. Britain does not “rule” the countries in the Commonwealth.
While the economic and political dominaton of the UK and the US help a lot to understand the wide use of English, there are a couple of other factors:
(1) English is closely related, in grammar and vocabulary, to several other major languages, including French, Spanish and German. People with those as first languages find it much easier to learn English than Chinese. There are no languages widely spoken outside China that are similiarly close to Chinese.
(2) English uses the most widely used writing system – a system which is even taught to elementary school students in China, becaue it is far easier to learn than Chinese script.
(3) Although the subtleties of English grammar are many, at an elementary level it’s easy to learn – practically no gender, few complex conjugations and declinations of nouns and verbs, straight forward word order. So it’s relatively easy for beginners to communicate in, without worrying about not getting the right forms of nouns, verbs and adjectives, or getting words in the wrong order.
(4) While there are some problems with English sounds for foreigners – the two “th” sounds, the distinction between “l” and “r”, the short “a” sound – Chinese is a tonal language, which makes it hard for people coming from non-tonal languages.
My two cents worth -
English is easy to type. No pictographs, no accents, no tildas, very little bunny fluff. Hawaiian might be easier but why ruin paradise.
You can try to force people to do something but they are not going to keep doing it unless they want to.
I suspect that Najee might already know some or all of these facts, but his or her facility with English is not quite up to employing verb tenses to communicate such understanding.
No way are any of the pictographic, tonal languages going to become the lingua franca of the world. English may get supplanted, but it won’t be by one of those, for the reasons already given. Personally, I think English will dominate for the next several hundred years because of its ability to borrow freely from other languages whenever necessary. Or whenever the speakers feel like it. Spanish words are getting incorporated into mainstream English at an ever-increasing rate. Soon, Arabic and Mandarin words will join them. Flexibility is the key, and English is the most flexible language available to the majority of the planet.
Another advantage of English is that it is easy to speak badly in it and still be understood. 
I expect that simplifications will occir, like aligning the third-person present tense with the other present-tense forms (I go, you go, he/she/it go (rather than goes), we go, you go, they go). This may be the next step in English’s evolution.
Or we may all end up communicating in txt msgs & L33tsp33k…
ISTR that 200+ years ago, French was the ‘international language’. Before that, Latin?
This is true of most languages. Those of us in monoglot America tend to forget this, but in huge parts of the world, people live in societies in which multiple languages are spoken. My relatives in Bombay, for example, speak Bengali at home, English and formal Hindi at school, vernacular Hindi (as well as some Gujarati and Marathi) on the street, and homogenized vernacular Hindi and Urdu in popular songs and movies. This is the environment in which the human race evolved. In many cases, to communicate with random people on the street, one has to construct an impromptu pidgin combining one or more of these languages.
People are perfectly able to function in an environment in which they have varying degrees of facility with the languages that surround them.
No way? There’s no intrinsic reason why it can’t happen. All languages are created by humans; thus, humans can learn many aspects of other languages (to a degree).
Maybe, maybe not. These things aren’t necessarily predictable.
All languages are flexible and are continuously changing. Why do you think there are conservative forces (in France and the United States, for example) that are always trying to preserve language purity?
There is nothing new or remarkable about the way English absorbs words from other languages. This is a basic characteristic of human language.
Certainly not. Or at least, very unlikely. Mandarin has the most speakers of any language in the world, but they’re mostly in China, Malaysia, Taiwan, and Singapore. There’s Chinese ethnic minorities in other places, but not enough to serve as a lingua franca (and many of those places don’t have substantial Mandarin-speaking populations anyway, since their inhabitants are native to other areas of China.) It simply doesn’t have the degree of international presence that English, or French, or Spanish, or even Modern Standard Arabic have.
And while Cantonese is growing more important, as the most commonly-spoken language of Hong Kong, at 60-odd million speakers, it just doesn’t have nearly the native-speaking population to establish itself internationally. Speakers of Wu Chinese, Javanese, Marathi, and Telugu (amongst others) are all more numerous. Cantonese would be a very strange choice as an international language. If Mandarin is unlikely, Cantonese (with about one-fifteenth the total speaking population) ain’t ever gonna become an international language.
What? “Pictographic language”? Did you use this phrase seriously?
Firstly, a tiny, tiny percentage of the Chinese characters are representational. None of them are pictures, however. Pictographs are those little pictures used by certain pre-literate societies, and the Chinese characters most assuredly are not pictographs - are you trying to suggest that one of the oldest societies on earth doesn’t even use writing?
Besides, there’s nothing inherent in the languages that requires the use of Chinese characters. There are plenty of alternative methods that could be used - admittedly, it’s tough to develop literacy in Chinese. But if there was political reason to do so, Mandarin would be established as an international language, probably with an alternate writing system. You’re correct that Mandarin will not become an international language, but your reasoning is completely incorrect.
Read that over again, and tell me if it makes any sense when you read it. Because it doesn’t make sense to me. What makes you think English has some special ability to borrow words from other languages? Why would that be the case? Are you unaware that many other languages borrow substantial amounts of vocabulary? Why would it be some sort of unique trait for a language to borrow words? All languages do that. If there’s need for a word in a language, either a new one is invented or one is borrowed. Why would that be different from language to language?
Another factor, nowadays, is the dominance of English in popular culture. Around the world, many of the most popular movies, TV shows, books, popular music, web sites, etc. come from America, England, and other English-speaking countries. Whichever came first (in a chicken-and-egg sort of way), widespread familiarity with the English language and widespread enjoyment of English-language entertainment reinforce and strengthen each other,
Ok, I’ll admit I was banging out a hastily-phrased answer. Ideogram, not pictogram, and I do know the difference. What I meant was that IMO no language that isn’t letter-based will dominate. I am aware that there is borrowing done in all languages. But none more so than English. Others do it when they have to. English seems to do it just because it can. 
Balderdash. People borrow from other languages whenever they feel like. If you watch contemporary Hindi movies, you might notice that invariably the Hindi-speaking characters refer to their parents as “mummy” and “daddy,” even though there are ample formal and informal words (mata/ma, pita/bap/baba) for them in Hindi.
There are a couple of reasons why English is better at borrowing than many other languages.
Firstly, English was reborn after the Norman Conquest of England, when the dominant language of England was French. So Anglo-Saxon rapidly simplified its grammar, and imported an enormous amount of French vocabulary to become Middle English. It’s almost a hybrid Germanic-Romance language as a result.
Second, there isn’t an official academy or an official government policy restricting borrowing, in the way there is in French and some other languages. You want to borrow a word from Swahili or Tibetan? Fine, you can just do that, and no one will want you to find a native English word for the concept.
I think it may be important that English borrows from everywhere, while most other languages have more limited sources.
How is this relevant to borrowing?
And who’s actually going to stop someone who speaks a language for which there is an academy or government poilcy from borrowing? As I said before, the existence of such authorities is a pretty good indication that there is a lot of borrowing going on at the colloquial level.
Cite, baby.