Illiteracy in the Middle Ages was common. When one king needed to communicate with another, he would hire a scribe to draw the message in written language. It is well known the fact that Charlemagne (8th century) was illiterate. The unavailability of printing made writing systems non-standard and complex. The art of writing was a professional skill not available to everyone. That is perhaps one of the reasons why the Portuguese expedition that claimed Brazil for the crown of Portugal in 1500 brought Pero Vaz de Caminha as the official writer.
By 1700, Europe's literacy rate ranged from 30 to 40 percent; by 1850, 50 to 55 percent; and by the second half of the 19th century writing became a basic qualification in the human societies. In the 20th century illiteracy became definitely an ailment in any field, in any profession. Today an illiterate person in a developed country is an outcast.
What happened with the skills of reading and writing will soon happen with the ability to speak a second language. If we compare the importance of speaking a foreign language 50 years ago with the necessity it represents today, we can foresee how important it will be by the time our children become adults.
By electing English as the world language, the history sentenced monolingualism to become the illiteracy of the coming future. But how did it happen?
As a result of the Industrial Revolution, the British economic predominance in the 19th century paved the way for a colonialism of large geographical reach that spread the English language in the world.
More importantly, the strong political and military predominance of the U.S. after World War II paved the way for a substantial economic and cultural influence that displaced French from the sphere of diplomacy and fixed English as the standard for international communication.
Today's search for information and need for global communication have already promoted English from being the language of the American, the British, the Irish, the Australian, the New Zealand, the Canadian, the Caribbean, and the South African peoples to being the international language. While Portuguese is spoken in 4 countries by approximately 195 million people, English is spoken as a native language by nearly four hundred million people and has become a lingua franca, the Latin of the modern world, "spoken in every continent by approximately eight hundred million people" (Todd iv).
More radical estimates, which include speakers with a lower level of language fluency and awareness, have suggested that the overall total is these days well in excess of 1,000 million.
In addition, it is estimated that 85 percent of all scientific publications, 75 percent of all international communication in writing, 80 percent of all information in the world's computers, and 90 percent of Internet content are in English.
The inexpensiveness of air transportation has increased interpersonal contacts worldwide. Computer, optical fiber, and satellite technologies likewise have made possible a boom in telecommunications, bringing up the concept of information superhighway. These two developments demonstrate how the world has evolved into a global village and how imperatively a standard language is required.
In its role as a global language, English has become one of the most important academic and professional tools. The English language is recognized as undoubtedly the most important language for the increasingly mobile international community to learn. This is a fact that seems to be irreversible. English has become the official language of the business and scientific worlds.
Philip B. Gove in his preface to Webster's Third New International Dictionary illustrates this point:
It is now fairly clear that before the twentieth century is over every community of the world will have learned how to communicate with all the rest of humanity. In this process of intercommunication the English language has already become the most important language on earth. (5a)
And David Crystal adds:
As English becomes the chief means of communication between nations, it is crucial to ensure that it is taught accurately and efficiently, ... (3)
It is predictable today that wealth will give way to knowledge and information in determining the shape of the future human society, and speaking the common world language will be fundamental to achieve success.