[Ted.com] by Patricia Ryan "Don’t insist on English "

summary

Patricia Ryan as the speaker who are living and teaching in Gulf for over 30 years  talks about language loss and globalization of English. She tells about her friend who was teaching English to adults in Abu Dhabi. Her friend decided to make them into the garden to teach them some nature vocabulary, but it was her friend who ended up learning all the Arabic words for the local plants, as well as their uses — medicinal uses, cosmetics, cooking, herbal. Today, languages are dying at an unprecedented rate. A language dies every 14 days. Now, at the same time, English is the undisputed global language. The speaker along with her friend  were brought to teach English because the government wanted to modernize the country and to empower the citizens through education, and  the U.K. benefited from some of that lovely oil wealth.

Patricia tells a story about two English scientists. They were doing an experiment to do with genetics and the forelimbs and the hind limbs of animals. But they couldn't get the results they wanted. They really didn't know what to do, until along came a German scientist who realized that they were using two words for forelimb and hind limb, whereas genetics does not differentiate and neither does German. So bingo, problem solved. If you can't think a thought, you are stuck. But if another language can think that thought, then, by cooperating, we can achieve and learn so much more.

In short, she talks that people who have no light, whether it's physical or metaphorical, cannot pass our exams, and we can never know what they know. Let us not keep them and ourselves in the dark. Let us celebrate diversity.Mind your language. Use it to spread great ideas.