Tipping Points

Abstract

In 1998, the South Korean novelist Pok Ko-il proposed that his country make English its new mother tongue and that the Korean language be moved to a museum case where it belongs. Having provoked the uproar he must have intended, he relented a bit, suggesting that English should be the country’s second official language, something that many South Korean educators already support. In 2000, the Prime Minister’s Commission on Japan’s Goals for the 21st Century unleashed a similar storm by advocating that English be made a working language alongside Japanese or even the second official language. In 2003, the Chilean Ministry of Education set in motion a program known as English Opens Doors (Inglés Abre Puertas), to make all students proficient in English in a decade and to make all Chileans bilingual (in Spanish and English) in a generation. In 2009, the Swiss National Science Foundation in Berne suggested that the time had come to make English an official language in Switzerland, along with French, German, and Italian. ¹ None of these daring proposals has yet become a reality, but they are all signs of the frenzy in the past two decades to meet the challenges of a rapidly globalizing world in which knowing English is a major asset.