English - What you don't know might hurt you

One needs to add that even non-English speaking "tiger" economies (South Korea, China, Japan et al.) are investing a lot to make their population learn English langauge. One of the most promising jobs for foreigners in these countries is being an ESL (English as a Second Language) teacher - and only native English speakers are considered eligible for that job.

Extract from Khalid Ahmed's article in today's Daily Times:



The language of learning has often been ‘foreign’. Khayyam wrote his poetry in his mother tongue but did his twenty odd tracts in mathematics in Arabic, the imperial language of his times. The same went for a large number of great Persian writers, including Ibn Sina and Imam Ghazali. They also went to ‘privileged’ schools endowed by the aristocracy for their own children.

In Khurasan, Persian was the imperial idiom and the Mughals took it although it was not their mother tongue. Babur insisted however on writing his Tuzuk in Uzbek.

Language is an asset no matter how acquired. And if it happens to be global then it is sheer good luck to have it as a past colonial experience. The Internet is 90 percent English and all exporting countries are struggling to learn the language to increase their wealth.