Our era is marked by wild globalization unfolding in various scopes and scales and the burst of human achievements across science, technology, culture, and beyond. The former has deeply interconnected humanity and exposed languages to exogenous forces, while the latter has highlighted the rapid expansion of scientific and technical terminology in all domains. In both trends, the globe-spanning, powerful English has emerged as the lingua franca in our globalizing world and the leading language across all academic, technical, and industrial advancements.
Unsurprisingly, this dominant, ubiquitous, and prolific English has caught all major languages off guard, imposing on them a raft of serious challenges lexically, semantically, and culturally. Now, in this rapidly evolving ecosystem where national languages have been functioning, the foremost task is enabling these languages to keep up with the ever-expanding terminology, promoting neologisms, and safeguarding the lexical reservoir and sophisticated roles of languages in all spheres of the modern world.
It is an indispensable yet tall order. It demands sustained multidisciplinary efforts to systematically modernize scientific terminology and a whole-of-government grand strategy to craft and implement a panoply of legal, economic, educational, media, and societal initiatives to protect and promote a vocabulary-rich, sophisticated language for all functions of our modern society.