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A language for the world
属于世界的语言
By learning English, people around the globe are changing it, too.
世界各地的人们在学习英语的同时也在改变英语。
What country does French belong to? The answer seems obvious: France, as it says on the label. But there are roughly four times as many speakers of French outside France as there are within it.
法语属于哪个国家？答案很明显：法国，顾名思义就是“法国的语言”。但法国以外讲法语的人数大约是法国人数的四倍。
Who does Portuguese belong to? You might now hesitate to blurt out “Portugal”, remembering that Brazil’s population is about 20 times bigger than Portugal’s.
葡萄牙语属于谁？你现在可能会犹豫一下，而不是脱口而出“葡萄牙”，因为你想起来巴西的人口大约是葡萄牙人口的20倍。
Maybe Portuguese belongs jointly to them both. But then 70m people live in African countries in which Portuguese is an official language. Perhaps it belongs to them, too.
也许葡萄牙语属于这两个国家。但还有7000万人生活在以葡萄牙语为官方语言的非洲国家。或许葡萄牙语也属于他们。
The English can be under no illusion that the language of the same nam e is exclusively theirs. The small matters of the other nations in the British Isles, and of the superpower across the Atlantic, make clear that it is joint property.
英格兰人绝不会幻想英语为他们所独有。不列颠群岛上的其他几个民族和大西洋彼岸的超级大国之间的瓜葛都清楚地表明，英语是共同财产。
But these countries—along with Canada, Australia and other Anglophone peoples—must at some point come to terms with the fact that, even collectively, their language no longer belongs to them.
但这些国家--以及加拿大、澳大利亚和其他讲英语的民族--必须迟早接受这样一个事实，即就算他们作为整体，英语也不再属于他们。
Of the estimated billion people who speak English, less than half live in those core English-speaking countries. Every day, the proportion of English-speakers born outside the traditional Anglosphere grows.
据估计，在10亿讲英语的人中，只有不到一半的人生活在这些核心英语国家。出生于传统英语文化圈之外的说英语的人的比例每天都在增加。
Perhaps 40% of people in the European Union speak English, or about 180m—vastly more than the combined population of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
欧盟可能有40%的人说英语，相当于1.8亿人，远远超过英国、加拿大、澳大利亚和新西兰人口的总和。
In India, calculations range from 60m to 200m. Most such estimates make it the second-biggest Anglophone country in the world.
在印度，这一数字为6000万至2亿。大多数这样的估计结果使印度成为世界第二大说英语的国家。
English-speakers pride themselves on the spread of the language, and often attribute that to an open, liberal-minded attitude whereby it has happily soaked up words from around the world.
说英语的人为英语的传播感到自豪，并经常将其归因于一种开放、自由的态度，凭借这种态度，英语欣然吸收了来自世界各地的词汇。
In the coming century, though, English will do more than borrow words. In these non-Anglophone countries, it is becoming not just a useful second language, but a native one.
然而，在接下来的一个世纪里，英语将不仅仅是借来词汇。在这些非英语国家，英语不仅会成为一种有用的第二语言，而且会成为一种母语。
Already it is easy to find children in northern Europe who speak as though they come from Kansas, the product of childhoods immersed in subtitled films and television in English, along with music, gaming and YouTube.
现在已经很容易找到说起话来像来自美国堪萨斯州的北欧小孩了，这是小孩从小沉浸在有字幕的英语影视，以及音乐、游戏和YouTube视频的结果。
