Aškerčevi asi 2022-23

English - The Language That Makes The World Go Round

Nowadays, we can't imagine a world without English since we hear and use it on a daily basis, be it through substituting unknown words in our native language with English ones, speaking to people who don't understand our native language, or just being more expressive. Regardless of our usage, it's still massively present in everyday life. However, this wasn't always the case, as is apparent if we go back about 400 years. Hundreds of years ago, English was nowhere near as widespread as it is today and was mostly contained to the British Isles and hardly spoken outside of them. It was only through the colonization perpetuated by the British Empire in the 18th century that the language began to spread. Throughout the centuries, English has gone from being a mostly unknown, local language with no more than a few million speakers to a global one with close to 1.2 billion speakers worldwide, even surpassing Mandarin in the number of total speakers. If we cut back to the present, we can see that English is amassing more and more speakers as more and more words are being added to the language by the day. Its rapid evolution and growth, especially with younger people across the globe, is commendable as we are getting closer to achieving a real global language, allowing us to communicate without any problems.

Aljoša Stankovič, 3. b

Maša Urbančič, 2. a

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