Will English as lingua franca suffer as a result of the financial crisis

Great Debates
21

This is exactly what I was going to say. English spread around the globe on British ships. It stuck for various reasons: in some cases, the indigenous language was lost (like in a lot of American Indian cases) or English became the lingua franca because it was not tied to one ethnic group in the country.

And no language is intrinsically easier to learn than another. It all depends on what language you start with. Mandarin is only hard for English speakers because it doesn’t have a lot of overlap with English, particularly the tone part. But speakers of another tone language, like Navajo, would probably have an easier time learning Chinese than a language like English where tone is not part of meaning in the same way. Babies learn all languages at basically the same rate.

I’m in the middle of reading Postcolonial English and may have something more to say when I get further along.

22

Yes, but people learn to read MUCH slower. I believe Chinese children become literate much later, and even well educated adults run in to characters they don’t know quite often.

Of course, you can learn a language well without being literate, but it can be very hard for a second-language speaker in another country to pick up new vocabulary, etc. without being able to read.

23

Good point. I didn’t mean to insinuate anything about literacy, just the basic myth that some languages are “easier” to learn (to speak). And since this thread is concerned with business, then literacy is very important.

24

No, some languages are indeed easier to learn than others. Spanish is without question easier than English, because it is more logical and consistent with its rules and the exceptions to those rules. We laugh at children when they say things like “I thinked” by why? “Thought” is not the logical conjugation of that word. You can look at any Spanish word and immediately know how to pronounce it, including where the stress goes. Try pronouncing common English words like psychology or rough. Forget about a lot of proper names like Worcestershire sauce - the non-native English-speakers I know won’t even attempt that one. And double-consonants? Forgetaboutit. Almost all unnecessary. Babies learn languages quickly for a lot of reasons unrelated to the ease of learning that particular language.

25

Actually, I think it goes back a little before that. The reason English is spoken all over the world probably has more to do with the Brittish Empire than US superpower status. The fall of the Brittish Empire didn’t seem to dissuade people from speaking English around the world.

This is a perfect example of how media hype can cloud reality. The “financial crisis” and the “rise of China” have featured predominantly in the news for some time now. It gives people the impression that they are going to wake up tomorrow and the world will be speaking Chinese. The fact is, the United States still has the largest economy in the world (excluding the EU which is really a bunch of nations). It’s larger than the next three economies combined (Japan, Germany, China), of which China is only the fourth largest. India is twelvth.

This financial crisis will not have a long-term impact on the world. It will pass just like the crisis in 2001, the early 90s, mid 80s and late 70s all eventually passed. 18 months from now, people will be throwing money into the next speculative bubble thinking that one will never end. Maybe in 50 years, China will be much more dominant, but for now, I don’t plan on learning Mandarin.

26

Without question?

Seriously, it couldn’t be more clear that the ease of learning a second language depends heavily on what language you already know. A native speaker of Frisian is probably going to find English easier than Spanish, and a native speaker of Catalan is going to find Spanish easier than English.

And the following is complete nonsense:

…unless you think “rules of language = rules of spelling.”

As for pronunciation, I can pronounce ‘rough’ a lot easier than ‘perro.’ Why is that? Because I am a native speaker of English, and the r in ‘rough’ is easy for me and the r in ‘perro’ is hard for me*. Again, if you were only talking about rules for spelling, then you are missing most of what constitutes a language.

*Actually, not for me but for most Americans I know…

27

I don’t see how you could say that. If you were from another planet and someone taught you the Spanish and English alphabets (almost identical), you could pronounce perro without a problem; even if you had difficulty rolling your tongue you would know how to pronounce it.

You would look at rough and go, ok, ro-u----->what the hell is that sound—>gh

You would look at psychology and go —>puh–>si, sy :confused:, chol (not kahl) —>o—>gi, gee :confused:, and of course have no idea which syllable to stress.

English has been influenced by so many other languages (not saying this is a bad thing by any means) that it is a total illogical mess and very difficult for non-native speakers to learn. Languages that have been more closely guarded such as Spanish and French are a breeze in comparison.

28

Makes me even prouder to be an Englishman knowing that my language is, and always will be, the language the whole world understands.

Innit?

::cue:: “Land of Hope and Glory”…

29

All languages have magically the exact same complexity? Esperanto, and languages like it are constructed to be easier to learn, by among other things removing grammatical irregularities. But I guess all their work is in vain.

English is nothing but a bit of bastardization of Danish, thrown in some superficial and ugly French words and some other stuff. But seriously, sure speaking English comes with some benefits, though I always though it must suck not being able to speak an obscure language like Danish. You are never able to speak in public without everybody understanding you.

30

Well, no, English is quite a bit more than that. Its words are something like 60% derived from Latin, some large percentage from Greek, another significant chunk from German*, and a whole hell of a lot of loan-words from all over the globe. “Nothing but a bit of a bastardization of Danish, etc” is perhaps the grossest oversimplification of anything I’ve seen, ever.

*All of these numbers are argued over, but let’s just say lots from the 3 languages I mentioned

Edit: And of course you have to shoehorn somewhere in there words that originated in English

31

Latin slatin. Latin is basically Danish too and Caesar was from Jutland. Nero though. He was Swedish.

32

You know, you’re right. I had forgotten about that.

33

Speaking as a person who has learned both as secondary languages: No, it’s not.

34

Babies don’t learn language from the alphabet. They learn from listening to people around them. Second language acquisition among literate people can be influenced by the spelling, but not everyone learning English as a second language is learning it in school. I wouldn’t be surprised if most weren’t.

Yes, it’s true. Complexity of syntactic rules can be offset by simplicity of phonology or morphology or whathaveyou. Pre-lingual babies have no problem learning any language in the world. After that baby has already learned one language, the ease of a second (particularly after the critical age) will be based on its first language.

Esperanto is easier for speakers of Indo-European language speakers to learn than, say, speakers of Mandarin or Navajo, and it’s easiest for native speakers of Esperanto.

35

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words;
on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat
them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
–James D. Nicoll May 15th, 1990.

36

So if the creator of Esperanto had decided to throw in another three or four genders and some grammatical irregularities too, just for fun. It would have made no difference, because all languages are equally difficult to learn.

37

As first language learners, yes. You’re also forgetting the other aspects of grammar, like phonology, semantics, morphology, lexicon, pragmatics. Complexity is not just a matter of gender or syntax. You can’t make a functioning, natural language that is not complex at some level.

And, you’ll notice, there aren’t that many speakers of Esperanto, yet the “irregular” English language has become a lingua franca for much of the world.

But, seriously, let’s get back to the question at hand. I really didn’t mean to be a part of hijack of an interesting thread.

38

You still haven’t shown that all natural languages are roughly equal in complexity. All you have said is that some languages are more complex in some areas while being less complex in others. True, no one language is complex in all areas, and no language is so difficult that native speaking children have difficulty picking it up (but then, languages like that would hardly have survived.) But that does not prove your point, by any means. Rune’s illustration was merely intended to show that it is possible that some languages are simpler than others.

39

I’m not really sure how I can “prove” to you that all languages are roughly equally complex. Do you want me to go through every language and rate the complexity of it’s phonology, syntax, and so on? Clearly we have an upper bound on complexity: if it’s too complex, no one can speak it. We also have a lower bound: not enough complexity, you can’t express everything. I would say those bounds create a rather tight range. The fact still stands that they’re all equally easy to learn for a pre-lingual baby, and the ease of learning after the critical age is due to what language you start with. If the range of complexity were large, the thing about the babies wouldn’t be the case.

I have a problem with the use of Esperanto as an example, since it’s not really a natural language. It is once it is in the mouths of speakers, especially native ones, but the example of the god-like hand of it’s creator adding a couple of irregular verbs says nothing about how natural language works.

But, seriously, how will the financial crisis affect English as a world language? I say, not that much since it was spread by the British Empire … that fell. People have already invested so much in the English infrastructure, I would be surprised if some other language could take its place.

40

I once had a Hungarian* friend who had come to live in England and, by the time I knew him, had learned to speak excellent English. He told me that English is one of the easiest languages to learn initially (IIRC he said “for the first year”), but one of the most difficult to fully master after that.

It is easy at first because the basic syntax of English is particularly simple. Nouns do not have to be declined at all (except for pluralization, which nearly always involves adding an “s” sound to the end, and the possessive which uses the “apostrophe s”**), there is virtually no grammatical gender (except for beings that are clearly differentiated by actual sex), there is really only one way of conjugating regular verbs (and even there, unlike many languages, the form of the verb does not change much, if at all, when used in a different “person” - I jump, you jump, he/she jumps, we jump, you jump, they jump), there are not particularly many irregular verbs, and most of them are not very irregular (e.g. although the past tense of “run” is “ran” rather than “runned”, in other respects it behaves pretty much like a regular verb). Most syntactic information in English is conveyed via a word’s position in a sentence. In other languages, you have to get the word order right and the inflection of many of the words. In English you scarcely have to worry about inflection, and even if you do get it wrong it is unlikely to cause any misunderstanding.

English is particularly difficult to fully master, however, because it is full of weird idioms: little phrases and constructions, often in very common use, that are completely irregular (syntactically, semantically, or both) and just have to be memorized one by one. (My Hungarian friend still struggled with certain idiomatic expressions, though he was getting there.) I am pretty sure I have read (and my Hungarian friend seemed to agree) that English has far more of these than most other languages.

And, of course, as others have pointed out, English spelling is full of weird irregularities, and is often not at all phonetic.

However, once someone has learned the relatively simple syntactical rules, and a good chunk of vocabulary of course (but that will be necessary for any language), they can make themselves understood in English, even if they don’t know many of the idioms. It will be obvious they are not native speakers, of course, but natives and even other speakers of “basic” English will be able to understand them perfectly well, and they will be able to understand most of what is said to them. English (spoken English at any rate), I am suggesting, is an easier language to “get by in” than many others.

Furthermore, I believe I have read that the syntactical rules of English are actually showing a trend toward becoming more simple over time in recent years. Some of those few irregular verbs are becoming regularized, and so forth (and already American spelling is not quite so irrational as British). This is thought to be, in large part, a result of the fact that it is spoken by so many as a second language. Non-native speakers are further simplifying the already simple syntax, making the language even easier to start to learn, and this is trickling back to the natives. (I wish I could remember a cite for this, but I can’t.)

Connected with this last point, I also recall reading somewhere that grammatical complexity of a language tends to be inversely proportional to the numbers of native speakers. The most syntactically complex languages known are usually those spoken by only a few hundred, or even only a few score, people deep in the jungles of Amazonia or New Guinea, or the central desserts of Australia.

  • It is relevant that he was Hungarian, because although most European languages are more or less closely related to one another, Hungarian is not related to any of them. This means that, so far as similarity to his native lounge went, all European languages started off on a more or less equal footing for him. Nearly all European languages (together with many languages of western and southern Asia) are part of the Indo-European language family. To the best of my recollection, the only ones that are not Indo-European are Hungarian and Basque (and those are not related to one another). (I have a vague idea that maybe Finnish and Estonian might not be Indo-European, but I am by no means sure of that. In any case, they are still not related to Hungarian.)
    **It is true that the rules for spelling possessive plurals, and possessives of words that end in s anyway can get confusing even for native English speakers, but this issue hardly impacts spoken English at all, and even in written English errors are usually unimportant and rarely affect comprehensibility.