Questão 1914516

TEXT 20

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What makes a global language?

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Why a language becomes a global language has

little to do with the number of people who speak it.

It is much more to do with who those speakers are.

Latin became an international language throughout

the Roman Empire, but this was not because the

Romans were more numerous than the peoples

they subjugated. They were simply more powerful.

And later, when Roman military power declined,

Latin remained for a millennium as the international

language of education, thanks to a diff erent sort

of power – the ecclesiastical power of Roman

Catholicism. There is the closest of links between

language dominance and economic, technological,

and cultural power, too, and this relationship will

become increasingly clear as the history of English

is told. Without a strong power-base, of whatever

kind, no language can make progress as an

international medium of communication. Language

has no independent existence, living in some sort of

mystical space apart from the people who speak it.

Language exists only in the brains and mouths and

ears and hands and eyes of its users. When they

succeed, on the international stage, their language

succeeds. When they fail, their language fails.

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(Source: CRYSTAL, David. English as a Global Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 7)

The words there and their are: