The internet has become the driving force in the spread of English throughout the world, a consultant linguist said on the sidelines of a conference this week.
'All those electronic resources can be used in many languages. But at the moment, those who want to reach a worldwide audience use English,' said Professor Michael Halliday, an adviser to a City University language research centre. 'People feel that this is how they can get access to personal and economic contacts.'
The linguist, also an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of Sydney, is known for his influential grammar model, known as 'systemic functional linguistics '.
The model stresses that language is a resource for communication rather than a set of rules, and has been applied to a variety of languages.
Professor Halliday was speaking at City University this week, where linguists explored the patterns of how English, Chinese and Spanish had become the three most dominant languages in the world.
He said that over the past centuries, the growth of the English language had been mainly prompted by the former British colonial empire and the United States with its political and economic influence.
