English in Mongolia

James Brooke has a great article in the NYT (that I can’t find on their website) on the rise of English as Mongolia’s “official” foreign language.

“We are looking at Singapore as a model,” Tsakhia Elbegdorj, Mongolia’s prime minister, said in an interview, his own American English honed at graduate school at Harvard University. “We see English not only as a way of communicating, but as a way of opening windows on the wider world.”

Camel herders may not yet refer to each other as “dude,” but Mongolia, thousands of kilometers from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language.

I can’t tell you how happy I would be if English education in Inner Asia improved to the point that “dude” replaced “fuck you” as a friendly greeting. It seems like Mongolia is devoting serious resources to significantly strengthening the state of English education in their schools.

After attempting during the 1990s to retrain about half of Mongolia’s 1,400 Russian language teachers to teach English, Mongolia now is embarking on a program to attract hundreds of qualified teachers from around the world to teach here. “I need 2,000 English teachers,” said Puntsag Tsagaan, Mongolia’s minister of education, culture and science. A graduate of a Soviet university, he laboriously explained in English that Mongolia hoped to attract English teachers, not only from Britain and North America, but from India, Singapore and Malaysia.

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Nathan Hamm – author of 2040 posts on Registan.net.

Nathan founded Registan.net in 2003. He was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uzbekistan 2000-2001 and received his MA in Central Asian Studies from the University of Washington in 2007. Since 2007, he has worked full-time as an analyst, consulting with clients on Central Asian affairs, specializing in how socio-cultural factors shape risks and opportunities. Follow him on Twitter or drop him a line.