A new landmark report on the position of the English language in the world commissioned by the British Council shows that the global dominance of the language poses major problems for the UK.

English Next, by language researcher David Graddol, demonstrates that the global spread of English, which has brought tangible benefits to the UK and other native speaking countries, will lead to serious economic and political disadvantages in the future in the UK unless plans are put in place immediately to remedy the situation.

Graddol concludes that monolingual English graduates face a bleak economic future as qualified multilingual young people from other countries are proving to have a competitive advantage over their British counterparts in global companies and organisations.

“English is, as ever, an important tool for operating on the world stage. But Graddol’s research highlights that once everyone speaks English, companies will naturally look for employees who speak other major languages such as Mandarin or Spanish as well. There is a need to take radical action and plan for the future otherwise we in the UK will find ourselves at a permanent disadvantage” said British Council, Director, English, John Whitehead.

Figures show that since 1945 there has been an explosion in English Language Teaching so that in his previous research, Graddol was able to demonstrate that within a decade 2 billion people would be speaking or learning English. But in English Next he explains that the reason for the huge rise in popularity of English is because it is no longer a foreign language for most of its learners - English is rapidly becoming something else - a near universal basic skill. Statistics show that nearly 60% of primary school children now learn English in China. More than that, the total numbers of English speakers in India and China - 500 million in total - now exceeds the number of speakers elsewhere in the world.

English Next outlines Graddol’s suggested solutions. “The UK’s best defence against the threat of the spread of English is, in fact, to learn other languages,” he says, “and we have to think carefully about which languages those are. French for example is declining as an international language, but Spanish, Mandarin and Arabic are all languages of the future. Ethnic minority groups in the UK may well prove to be a major asset in this effort.”

John Whitehead of the British Council said: “This piece of research is a call to action for the UK. We are currently responding to the huge demand for English Language Teaching through our network of teaching centres. We also run the largest accreditation scheme in the world. In terms of dealing with the future that Graddol predicts we've already made much headway. For example, we kick-started Mandarin teaching in the UK and have pioneered a number of programmes to encourage language learning and student/teacher exchanges both in Europe and the Arab World and further afield in Russia, Japan and South America. We've already recognised that it is absolutely essential for British children to learn other languages and we will be working hard to put further strategies in place to ensure this."

The report as PDF file for download (1,89 MB): English Next 2006