DaveBee wrote:
I'm sure hollywood/culture attracts some people but yes even normal people have non-telly-watching reasons for learning english.
The
830,000 polish immigrants to the UK will have needed to learn English for more than watching telly.
Careers in science now
require english. Bureaucrats in international organisations, employees in multi-national companies, all need english language skills to progress.[/quote]
Sorry i was talking about the way English is a lingua franca, and how everybody seemingly speaks it, and how it has has been this way for the last 20 years at least that i know of.
That's not down to people immigrating to a country that speaks the language. That's not down to careers in science.
Posting links is no good because you're arguing against something i'm not saying. I'm talking about lingua franca. I'm talking about widespread knowledge of English amongst sub-50 year olds Europe and world wide. You seem to be talking about people who have a genuine survival need to learn the language, of which the majority are not.
English is the lingua franca because of the media which is pretty much (in the grand scheme of things) all in English.