Berkley Center

I still remember my first attempt at Spanish conversation in Mexico. I was on my way home from the Mexico City airport, sneaking peeks at the streets of my new city while making conversation with my host family. They greeted me in English, but I was eager to start using the language I had been practicing all winter break. I asked a few questions in Spanish but could barely understand their responses. Our conversation quickly slipped back into English. I begrudgingly followed along, vowing to review some vocabulary or grammar structures later that night.

I’ve had similar experiences in my classes, even though they are all taught in Spanish: the first professor I met greeted me with a friendly “Hello, Jess!” instead of the “Hola!” she used for the rest of my classmates. On the first day of class, she repeated the most important information in English for me. The professor also allowed me to use English words when I couldn’t find them in my new language. Menus in restaurants, street signs, and advertisements often feature English translations, and every student I’ve met at my university speaks at least an intermediate level of English. English is the only foreign language that I have heard or seen here. This prevalence of English is not limited to Mexicans; I’ve also met other participants in my exchange program from Holland, Sweden, Colombia, France, and Spain that all speak fluent English and even take their college coursework in Europe in English. “They add English words to their sentences to seem ‘cool,’” my housemate said of her friends back home in France.

What does the prevalence of English mean for the world? According to linguists, English is globally dominant in a way that no other language has ever been: about a quarter of the world’s population can speak some level of English, and the vast majority are non-native speakers. The globalization of the economy is a contributing factor, as well as the dominance of American pop culture internationally. In one study of Mexican citizens, 58 percent viewed English as a skill needed for greater employability, and 49 percent valued English as a possibility for a better job. Only 2 percent of respondents said that they did not want to learn English. 

However, English education is not equally accessible to everyone in Mexico, where a small wealthy, urban class has vastly different lives than the rest of the population. In the same study of Mexican citizens, the most commonly cited reasons for not knowing English were that learning English is too expensive and that government-funded programs for learning English were not accessible to them. In low-income, rural communities, English-learning programs are often simply not available, perpetuating the cycle of poverty by further distancing their populations from opportunities for economic advancement.

The prevalence of English in business and tourism-related environments in Mexico doesn’t seem to have limited the use of Spanish; most Spanish speakers I know almost always speak Spanish around friends. Spanish is the language of instruction in universities, and restaurant servers or retail employees typically greet me in Spanish first before switching to English when necessary. In fact, I’ve learned that the vast majority of Mexicans only speak Spanish. My frequent interactions with English speakers are in part because of my proximity as a university student and foreigner to the upper-class, urban population of Mexico City.

What does it mean that the global population feels such intense economic pressure to learn a foreign language? Language is deeply tied to culture and history. Historically, colonizing or conquering forces, including the Spanish in modern-day Latin America and the Americans towards enslaved Africans, frequently forbid the use of native languages as a way of weakening an oppressed group. Now, as English overtakes other languages across the world, native English speakers have a responsibility to be aware of their privilege. 

As an individual, it’s hard to slow the sociocultural, economic, political, and historical forces that have pushed English to the global center. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t make changes to support non-native speakers. We can study common foreign languages to ease intercultural communication or examine and challenge biases in our places of study and work that assign unnecessary value to English fluency. Personally, I know that after stumbling over many sentences in Spanish and relying on the patience and kindness of whoever I’m communicating with, I will navigate conversations with English language learners with much more patience and empathy upon my return home.