For Mongolians, E Is for English, F Is for Future

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia - As she searched for the English words to name the razor-tooth fish swimming around her stomach on her faded blue and white T-shirt, 10-year-old Urantsetseg hardly seemed to embody an urgent new national policy.

"Father shark, mother shark, sister shark," she recited carefully. Stumped by a smaller, worried-looking fish, she paused, frowned. Then she cried out, "Lunch!"

Even in this settlement of dirt tracks, plank shanties and the circular felt yurts of herdsmen, the sounds of English can be heard from the youngest of students -- part of a nationwide drive to make it the primary foreign language learned in Mongolia, a landlocked expanse of open steppe sandwiched between Russia and China.

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

Its camel herders may not yet be referring to each other as "dude," but this Central Asian nation, thousands of miles from the nearest English-speaking nation, is a reflection of the steady march of English as a world language. Fueled by the Internet, the growing dominance of American culture and the financial realities of globalization, English is now taking hold in Asia, and elsewhere, just as it has done in many European countries.

In South Korea, six "English villages" are being established . where paying students can have their passports stamped for intensive weeks of English language immersion, taught by native speakers from all over the English-speaking world. The most ambitious village, a $85 million English town near Seoul will have Western architecture, signs, and a resident population of English-speaking foreigners.