- Argument‹5 of 5
US pop culture is globally prevalent
As long as Hollywood and U.S. pop culture remains prevalent throughout the world, English will still be an influential language.
The argument
A language's global standing rests on more than the number of its speakers, and this argument holds that English will remain the world's international language because of what is carried in it. Due to the popularity of US pop culture icons, accelerated by globalisation, English keeps arriving in people's lives whether or not they set out to learn it. The evidence offered is the informality of what people pick up. Young people around the globe are familiar with American English slang, such as "cool", "chill" or "nerd" — vocabulary that is not taught in classrooms and travels only because the culture carrying it is being consumed for pleasure. People who have never been to the US can picture American houses, families and everyday lives through visual media, so the language comes attached to a world the audience already feels familiar with. That familiarity converts into learning. Many non-native English speakers learn English through watching US media, such as Friends, Stranger Things or The Office, which means the language is acquired as a by-product of entertainment rather than as an effort undertaken against competing demands. The comparison with Mandarin is where the argument turns. Chinese media does not have the same cultural influence as American pop culture, so learning Mandarin remains a deliberate undertaking rather than something absorbed. Proximity does not change this: youth in Vietnam, a country geographically closer to China than to the US, prefer American pop culture and resist learning Mandarin. If adjacency and economic connection cannot produce that pull, distance will not produce it elsewhere. The cultural influence of American media will therefore ensure that English holds more cultural sway and prominence than Mandarin, whatever happens to the relative size of the two economies.
Context
Hollywood dominates much of the world's media markets. Several US musicians are popular internationally. American English is more common in Europe compared to British English. The spread of American pop culture is even more prevalent due to the Internet. Since American culture is widely known across the world, the English language becomes widely known by default.
Premises
Counter-arguments
US pop culture (and English) is no longer the only major player in the global pop culture field. South Korea is one of the only countries that actively exports its pop culture to the globe. Netflix and subtitles allow US Americans and others around the world to watch movies and TV shows in Spanish, Japanese, French, German, and Chinese. Increasing globalization does not just promote English use; globalization promotes more cultures and languages too.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise assumes cultural reach converts into linguistic dominance, but consumption no longer requires the producing language: subtitled and dubbed distribution lets audiences watch Spanish, Japanese, French, German and Chinese productions without acquiring any of those languages, which severs the link the premise depends on. [Rejecting P2] The claim that no rival exports culture at comparable scale is disputed: South Korea has built deliberate cultural export as national policy, and the same globalising forces the argument credits with spreading English also widen the circulation of other cultures and languages rather than narrowing it to one.