Why is English So Popular?

If you ask Scandinavians about the English language, most people are very positive. They consider English easy to learn and also feel that they manage to read and write it reasonably well. The reason for this, of course, is that Scandinavians are almost born into a bilingual community.

English dominates the media landscape. The majority of films, soaps and criminal series are in English. If we buy a CD, the lyrics of the songs are most likely in English. We start learning English during our first years at school, and the Norwegian language adopts English expressions (anglicisms) by the hour. Just think of all the signs you find in an ordinary Norwegian town. Nobody even stops to think about words like, sale, pub, bar, Body Shop, TV Shop, charts, hair-studio etc. They are a part of our daily life by now.

Have you ever thought about the way you and your friends express yourselves? How many English words do you use in your daily conversations? Think of words like “cool”, “not”, “party” and the ones you jotted down in the Pre-reading activity. We have been raised on the English language, and it is therefore easy to learn new expressions as we grow up. Nowadays, this is also the case in most countries, all over the world. We find words like "le week-end" in French, "der Computer" and "der Job" in German, "il soft- ware" in Italian, "el desodorante" in Spanish and "pikkunikku" in Japanese.

To be honest, English is not an especially easy language to learn. For one thing, the spelling is extremely difficult, as is the pronunciation, not to mention the extensive vocabulary. When reading English books, even the best-educated foreigner comes across words he has never seen or heard and in American schools there is a great focus on English vocabulary and spelling.