Is English the language of commerce by default?

 This was on The Star (20th October 2011) pg 54.

The views of this writer had aroused me to write my perspective of the issue.  Firstly, let me try to summarize, from my understanding of what the writer was trying to convey.  I sensed the writer was upset over the PPSMI ("Pengajaran & Pembelajaran Sains & Matematik dalam Bahasa Inggeris" = Teaching & Learning of Science and Mathematics in English). The writer when to great extend to argue the importance of English and urge everyone, especially the government not to ignore the importance. Finally, the writer called for action to "refurbish English prowess among Malaysians and repeal the scrapping of PPSMI.

Before I share my views on the subject, allow me to make my stand clear that I am not opposing or supporting the writer's view. I respect the writer's point of view and can see some merit to his arguments.  At the same time, I feel that other point of views to the same arguments.

The writer point out that English is the language for commerce, education and intellectual interactions. At present time that is undeniable.  But then again, Malay used to be the Lingua-franca in this region. Latin and Arabic used to be the language for education and intellectual interactions. If we look up history of the world, we would conclude that any language can the language for commerce, education and intellectual interactions.

Malay was the lingua-franca back then because it was the "official language" for the Melaka Sultanate, which rule commerce in the region and pretty much the same reason for English to be the language of world commerce because the English Speaking world (led by USA) rule world commerce. Despite that, you would find knowledge of local language useful when conducting commerce with certain economic powers like Japan, China, Germany, France, Korea, just to name a few. One might argue that even these economic powers use English as the language for their International Commerce. So my respond is...rewind 3 sentences and read again. I propose that the language for commerce is the language of the trading partner with the upper hand. If we "need" something from our trading partner, we'll communicate in their language.

We cannot insist on our trading partner to speak our language if we are the one in need. But for mutual benefits i.e when both do not have an upper hand, both parties might agree to use a common language comfortable to both; in the present world, English is the commonly acceptable language. But do you know that the United Nations has six official languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish, thus one cannot reject the use of these languages in any international forum/transactions? I let you figure out how these languages became the official languages of the UN. In doing so, you will see my point about having the upper hand makes the language of the trader the language of commerce.

In a similar fashion, Arabic and then Latin was the education and intellectual interaction. I propose that the language of education and intellectual interaction depends on the language that capture and transfer knowledge.  I will write to explain about this in another post....watch out for it.