We celebrate the English Language Festival annually. And it’s coming again.
The English Language Festival can not only enrich our school life but also can supply our students a great English condition.
Today my topic is ‘Multi-cultural of Foreign Languages’.
English
English is an Indo-European language belonging to the West Germanic branch or the official language of Britain and the United States and most of the commonwealth countries. Although there are only England, Ireland, the Unite States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa (more than ten countries) use English as their mother tongue, more than 160 countries use English as their second language and official language. Without colonialism invasion, a lot of countries talk in English because it is easier than other languages like French, Spanish and of course Chinese, and it is more central. If a business man want to sells his commodities abroad, it is necessary to learn English.
And English is a very interesting language, for it merged a lot of other languages like Chinese and French. So actually it is not too difficult to learn. For example, have you ever see words such as “film, cinema, café”, actually they are French words.
Do you know what’s the different between “pig” and “pork”?
In the past, they have the same meaning. Not long time ago in Britain, farmers breed a kind of animal on the farm and called them” pig”, they provided pig’s meat to aristocrats. Aristocrats called that kind of animal “pork”. In the course of time, that kind of animal names” pig” and their meat calls ”pork”.
French
The Romance language spoken in France and in countries colonized by France is French. The United Nations and European Union both use it as their official language.
At first, there were many different kinds of languages like Latin, Celts language and Germen were spoken in France. Over a long period of time, they began to mixed those languages together and it became a new language——French. So you actually can find a lot of different civilizations in this language.
There are more than 87’000’000 people in the world use French as their mother tongue, and about 190’000’000 people in the world can speak French.
A long time ago, lots of people spoke French and they proud of it, because it could and just could spoken by aristocrats.
And now, lots of important documents are still written in French because since it is more conscientious and careful than other languages.
Spanish
The Romance language spoken in most of Spain and the countries colonized by Spain is Spanish. A lot of people call Spanish as” castellano”, because they thought it is like a nation but not a language.
Although there are only 20 countries uses Spanish as their first official language, it is still very popular in the world. And now, at least 352’000’000 people are speaking or learning Spanish in the world, and the number is still rising.
There are at
