【世界の英語と日本人】英語の始まりは５世紀半ば／20億人超まで広がった理由／英語は語彙が多い／英語が分裂していくシナリオ／標準化の挫折／AI時代にも英語学習は必要か？／10年後の英語と日本人

Linguist Jun Terasawa (Aoyama Gakuin University) argues English went global through colonialism not linguistic merit, and AI translation may trigger its fragmentation like Latin into Romance languages.

• English had only ~hundreds of thousands of speakers in the 5th century and ~6 million in 1600 (Shakespeare’s era); it reached 2 billion today — growing 15-16x since 1900 while global population grew only 4x.
• English became global for social and historical reasons — British colonial expansion, then US economic and tech dominance — not because it is easier to learn; its vocabulary is among the largest of any language.
• 80% of English speakers today are non-native; native-to-native communication represents only ~4% of all English use, meaning the language no longer belongs to its native speakers alone.
• Japan’s English proficiency sits at 15% vs. South Korea 45% and China 29%; Trump signed an executive order making English the US official language in 2025, amid projections that Hispanics will exceed 30% of the US population by 2060.
• English prompts to ChatGPT and Gemini yield far more information than Japanese prompts due to massive training-data imbalance, making English ability increasingly valuable in the AI era rather than obsolete.
• If AI simultaneous translation eliminates the lingua franca function of English (a PIVOT guest predicted language barriers gone by 2026), English could fragment into separate languages the way Latin became Italian, French, and Spanish.
• Japan’s 2017 Ministry of Education curriculum explicitly mandates teaching ‘English as an international common language,’ not just standard American or British English, shifting away from native-speaker-only instruction.
• Terasawa predicts polarization in Japan within 10 years: a small elite achieves high English proficiency for global work while the majority relies on translation tools, likely shrinking demand for mass English education.

2026-04-25 · Watch on YouTube