English as a Dominant Language

Language is one of the most important aspects that can unify every human in the world. It means that humans are able to show their expresses, their feelings, their ideas, and the most obvious reason is to connect each other by using language. Those activities are called communication, which means a process to deliver an information from one person to the other. In addition, language is an identity for every human and it reflects their culture too, so we can conclude that language cannot separate from the culture. However, most people speak in English even they are non-native speakers nowadays. English has a dominant position in science, technology, medicine, and computers; in research, books, periodicals, and software; in transnational business, trade, shipping, and aviation; in diplomacy and international organization; in mass media entertainment, news agencies, and journalism; in youth culture and sport; in education systems, as the most widely learnt foreign language (Phillipson, 2002 : p.6). 

Globally, what we are experiencing is that English is replacing other languages. Displacement occurs when English takes over in specific domains, whether in computers or entertainment (Phillipson, 2002 : p. 27).  For example, most Indonesian who lives in big cities feels strange when they have to face something which usually written or spoken in English but translated into Bahasa. They feel less prestigious when they use Bahasa as their manual language in their social network accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogspot. While in entertainment, Indonesian feel more intellectual when they can speak in English and they often underestimate who is not capable of using English. This condition that makes English can be a bomb that can destroy your own language if you use English every time. From this, we can conclude that today we live in a neo-colonialism era, when the colonizers are no longer physically present in the colonized countries.

We can also see that English has been dominated our social life, especially in life style. The main targets of this cultural linguistic promotion are children and teenagers. They become the target of this cultural linguistic promotion because all of them can be influenced easily. For example, when we were in elementary school or junior high school, the words “so what gitu lho” became more popular. It is point out that people begin to use English more often in their daily informal conversation even they just mix English words into Bahasa. To sum up, English has an important role in dominate the international language. (Malik Ganis Ilman)