aau/Müller
Languages such as Sanskrit, Latin and Classical Arabic became widely used across different cultures because they were associated with power, prestige, and a shared cultural heritage. Linguist Nikola Dobrić sees English playing a similar role today, propelled by popular culture, the internet and capitalism. In this interview, he explores the concept of the ‘English Cosmopolis’, the declining dominance of native-speaker norms and the question of who will shape the standards of English in the future.
Would you say that English is still a foreign language for us, Mr Dobrić?
To me, Spanish and French are foreign languages in the true sense of the word, at least here in Austria. In our everyday lives, we rarely meet people from Spain or France with whom we might speak these languages. The same applies to media using Spanish or French: we rarely encounter films, posters, or video clips in either language. English, on the other hand, is not something we learn primarily to communicate with British or American people. We learn it to communicate with people from Spain, France, and the rest of the world. And we are constantly surrounded by English-language media. So English occupies a different place in our lives: we are exposed to it from a very early age. Research shows that children now learn more English outside school than they do in the classroom.
What does this mean in practice?
Today, English is not just a means of communication. It is also part of our identity. When I hear children talking to each other these days, they use words and expressions that I do not recognise, let alone their grandparents. They pick up these expressions from content they watch on platforms such as TikTok and YouTube, which reaches audiences around the world. By using these expressions, they signal that they belong to a group. This group is not defined by where its members live. Rather, it is international, usually forms online, communicates in English, and has its own shared codes.
For a long time, these expressions used by young people came from the USA.
Yes, until around 2000, this world was indeed heavily influenced by the USA, as most media, films, and music came from there. The internet has changed that. People can now create and share their own content from anywhere in the world, and more and more people are producing content in English without being native speakers.
What happens to English when more and more non-native speakers are being heard and seen around the world?
For a long time, we assumed that each language belonged to a particular people, nation, or country. We tend to think of a standard version of that language, which, incidentally, hardly anyone actually speaks. But before nationalism emerged some 300 years ago, nobody really thought about which language they were speaking. Most people spent their lives within a very small geographical area, where they simply spoke in whatever way worked. In linguistics, we distinguish between linguistic ability and language competence. Take the expressions to take a break and to make a break, for example. In school, we teach language competence based on the standard version of a language. Children learn to say to take a break. This is considered correct because a group of people established this particular pattern of language a long time ago, not because to take a break necessarily conveys something different from to make a break. At school, we teach children to reproduce this code. The problem is that outside school, they use language differently – just as people have always done. To make a break works because people understand each other.
And eventually, nobody will remember that the expression was originally to take a break?
Exactly. The question is where we draw the line between English as a foreign language, where the aim is to reproduce native-speaker usage, and English as a lingua franca, a shared code for communication. The only reason we should discuss where that line lies is to ensure that the code remains useful and that everyone can understand it. That is something we can have a meaningful discussion about. It becomes difficult when ideology enters the debate. Behind this lies the idea that languages belong to particular groups of people – and that if you do not speak a language ‘correctly’, you do not belong.
How did English come to acquire this status? Is it because it is less complex than other languages?
English is not inherently simpler than other languages. Rather, it became simpler as a result of migration throughout its history. Around the eighth century, English lost its grammatical gender distinctions and the associated endings when some 40,000 Vikings arrived in Britain. They did not care whether a noun was masculine, feminine, or neuter, and within a few generations, these distinctions had disappeared. But this cannot explain why English spread around the world. After all, Latin, Sanskrit, and Classical Arabic were highly complex languages, yet they still became widely used across different cultures. No, whether a language develops into a lingua franca is always a sociocultural matter.
Could you explain that in more detail?
Languages that have become widely used as lingua francas have always spread through power, typically through empires. When that power disappears, the people who were once ruled often adopt the language and make it their own. We have seen this in postcolonial contexts involving French and English, for example in Nigeria. Today, English has developed into a distinct variety in Nigeria. From the perspective of Nigerians, the process looks something like this: the language was originally a tool of empire, but now it belongs to ‘us’. In English linguistics, we have the three-circle model: in the inner circle, English is a first language; in the outer, postcolonial circle, it is a second language; and in the expanding circle, it is a foreign language. This model has been around since roughly 1990. But English has now acquired yet another status.
How did this come about?
What we have seen since the Second World War is similar to what happened in the Roman Empire: the spread of the language began with an inclusive empire. In this context, inclusive does not mean democratic or egalitarian. Rather, both empires were open to allowing people, including those from outside their own ethnic groups, to become part of the system and benefit from the opportunities it offered. The USA and the Roman Empire had something in common here: nationalism in the modern sense did not exist. American hegemony was even more inclusive abroad than it was at home, despite the racism within the country. Until 2025, the USA had no official language at the federal level. It was only under Trump that English was given official status. Efforts to preserve language standards also tended to come from British institutions. The image the USA projected abroad was one of entertainment through rock music and Hollywood, and economic opportunity through capitalism. People asked themselves: Could I be part of this? And often, the answer was yes. The real breakthrough towards English as a lingua cosmopolitana came with the rise of the internet in the early 2000s and the widespread optimism about globalisation at the time.
Why ‘Cosmopolis’?
The term works well because it describes what has developed around languages such as Sanskrit, Latin, and English: a world within the real world. This world is defined by a community of practice, held together by texts and media in a shared language. You belong to it if you understand the references and can show others that you do. This world exists independently of individual political powers. In the case of Latin, the republic of letters survived for a thousand years, while cities and churches came and went, because it had its own legitimacy and prestige. The empire was no longer its foundation; something more important had taken its place. Latin became closely linked to religion early on, but not just in the sense of the Church. Religion provided an overarching framework for everything: literature, science, politics – all of it was part of religion. For English today, that role is played by popular culture, the internet, capitalism, and globalism.
What do you tell students training to become English teachers about teaching the language in schools today?
That things have become more complicated. If we want children to have authentic experiences of using English, we do not necessarily need to take them on a language trip to London. We could just as well take them to a gaming convention in Rome or an accommodation centre for asylum seekers in Vienna. That is where they can experience English as it is actually used: as a lingua franca. English has reached a stage where its role as a lingua franca is more prominent than ever. There are still many native speakers, of course, but they make up only a small proportion of all those who speak English. In the past, you had to travel to be part of an international world. Today, you are practically part of it as soon as you switch on a screen.
So who ‘manages’ English today?
Conceptually, the situation is comparable to that of Latin or Sanskrit in the past. Today, we talk about stewardship, meaning the care or management of a language. It was only with the rise of nationalism that language became closely linked to the nation and the state, giving rise to the idea of language ownership, where someone determines which standards and norms apply. In linguistics, there is a long process involving descriptive studies, grammars, and textbooks, and the resulting standards are often far removed from how people actually speak. In the case of Latin and Classical Arabic, for example, there were no such owners, particularly as these languages eventually no longer had native speakers. Instead, there was a circle of experts acting as stewards, including figures such as Erasmus, who debated among themselves what should remain stable and what could be allowed to change.
Who plays that role for English today?
The new stewards are no longer human: they are algorithms and artificial intelligence. This is an entirely new situation. While linguists have spent the past forty or fifty years discussing how new standards might be developed for English as a lingua franca, AI has simply taken matters into its own hands over the past few years. It does not need to engage in debate. Everyone uses it because it is practical, and this only increases its influence. AI companies are interested in profit, not language standards. What is more, many of the texts used to train large language models were written by non-native speakers. It will therefore be interesting to see how English develops in light of these changes.
#top .hr.hr-invisible.av-mwd882ch-617b7c945b4724a0a220c50ea0c2061e{
height:30px;
}
.flex_column.av-nhlbdkr-f67ac6538fdc6543980ed40e147e4494{
border-radius:0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding:25px 25px 25px 25px;
}
#top .av-special-heading.av-28y6v97-9990fb2e76f30e9440e05198a3d1a72f{
margin:0px 0px 0px 0px;
padding-bottom:0;
}
body .av-special-heading.av-28y6v97-9990fb2e76f30e9440e05198a3d1a72f .av-special-heading-tag .heading-char{
font-size:25px;
}
.av-special-heading.av-28y6v97-9990fb2e76f30e9440e05198a3d1a72f .av-subheading{
font-size:15px;
}
About Nikola Dobrić
Nikola Dobrić studied English Literature and Corpus Linguistics at the University of Novi Sad (Serbia). In 2009, he joined the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt as a university assistant, where he completed his PhD in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in 2012. In 2021, he completed his habilitation in Applied Linguistics, focusing on language testing and assessment.
Nikola Dobrić is currently a Privatdozent at the University of Klagenfurt. He has published more than 50 academic papers, including the recent articles The English-Mediated European Cosmopolis as Proto-Federal Infrastructure (Journal of Language, Identity & Education), The English Cosmopolis (English Today), English as a ‘global’ language in a geopolitically changing world – the telling patterns observable in historical precedents (Asian Englishes) and Sanskrit, Classical Arabic, Latin and now English – a case of a special kind of lingua franca use and status (Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics). Alongside his academic work, Nikola Dobrić serves as an adviser to the European Commission and the European Parliament.
Der Beitrag What Latin was to Ancient Rome, English is to TikTok today: English as the language of the Cosmopolis erschien zuerst auf University of Klagenfurt.