演讲稿 大学英语演讲稿：ENGLISH

大学英语演讲稿：ENGLISH

ladies and gentlemen:

Good afternoon.

The arrival of the year xx has brought with a near perfect opportunity to take a look back at the last one thousand years, assess mans successes and failures, and look forward with our predictions of the third millennium.

Already this afternoon youve heard many assessments and youve heard a variety of predictions. A variety so vast, ranging from Lewis Carols depiction of celebratory life, to the Irish celebration of death. So vast a variety that its difficult to find any common ground amongst the contestants here today. Perhaps the only thing that we all share is that we are indeed discussing millennia, the old and the new and the turn of the millennium, and were all discussing it in the same language.

A few hundred years ago to have held an event like this it would have been imperative that we were all fluent in a number of different tongues, for the approach of combating the language barrier was simply to learn many different languages. Of course people back then had an ulterior motive: that was to ensure that different languages held their different societies or positions, or as King Charles V of Spain put it, I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to

my horse.

Today our approach is somewhat different. Instead of trying to vastly spread our verbal ability across the board, weve chosen rather to focus it, concentrating on our ability to master one particular language, the English language. Time magazine recently suggested that by the turn of the millennium, English will be the Lingua Franca for one quarter of the worlds population. Already today sixty percents of the worlds television and radio broadcasts are produced and delivered in English. Seventy percents of the worlds mail addressed in English. And it is the language of choice for almost every bite of computer data sent across the globe.

But why English? There are no clear linguistic reasons for its suggested global dominance, certainly the grammar is complicated, the spelling peculiar and the pronunciation eccentric, to say the very least. One would need only look through the dictionary to find the vast list of amusing paradoxes in the English languagequicksand that works slowly, a boxing ring that is in fact square and a guinea pig thats really neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. Doesnt it seem odd that one can make amends but not one amend. Or go through the annals of history but not one annal. The reason, ladies and gentlemen, is simple. English is strange, but no where near as strange as some of our alternatives.

Perhaps I should give you a few idiomatic examples. In English we