Don’t presume that just because China is likely to become the worlds largest economy, that Mandarin will necessarily become like English is today or Latin and Arabic were in earlier times. There are lots of examples of the language of the dominant power not being the linga franca. In the 19th century, English was not the worlds lingua franca, it was French, despite Britain being the most powerful nation on earth.
The Roman Empire saw heavy use of Greek, the Arabs; Persian. As it is; China’s neighbours almost without exception (besides Russia) use English as a sexond langauge heavily. Pakistan and India have it as an official language, Japan uses it heavily as a second languge, as does South Korea; a big business partner. In China’s near abroad, like Malaysia, Tahiland, Burma etc, English is heavily used. Mandarin is not even the native language of a lot of China. No reason why Chinese won’t use English.
I don’t much speak to children, not having any reason to, but I can’t say I’ve heard of them adopting American speech patterns — that was more likely in the 1950s what with Rock and Roll, plus American Bases all over to keep the natives in check.
I don’t even think they’re losing their regional accents as fast as was expected ( expected with TV providing the approved model ).
I’m not entirely convinced that English will forever remain the dominant language. The spread of English is attributable to the British Empire and America’s virtual modern hegemony. In particular, global trade is what makes learning to speak at least passable English so important. However, if England and the United States turn inward and trade wars really get into full swing, people will question the need to speak English. Maybe Europeans start learning to speak passable Mandarin Chinese instead.
I agree that it will be interesting to see how far AI devices can go in terms of translation. Perhaps they will indeed become so sophisticated that a person could at least get by in non-essential situations without knowing a foreign language.
They’re already good enough for that. With a little flexibility on the part of your target audience, Google Translate is fine for translating simple queries and observations into most major languages. The trick is to not get too complex, and to do back-and-forwards translations if you think you’re being garbled.
Trying to have a sophisticated conversation, however, is still more or less like trying to write poetry using only your left little finger on a 1950’s manual typewriter.
For the language of a small Germanic tribe/tribes to so dominate the world is pretty incredible. Chinese, Russian, even Arabic, you might expect, they had the numbers on their side. When you look back at history it’s almost like a pincer movement, with the breakaway colonies pushing the language westward and the Empire pushing it eastward to eventually encircle the globe. Not that it didn’t have serious rivals in French and Spanish, either one of which, given the different outcome of a few vital wars, might have been sitting where English is now.
However it’s one thing reaching the top, it’s quite another staying there. Will English still be dominant in a few centuries? I wouldn’t place money on it.
If and when it is replaced, I’d say that the leading contenders are Spanish and Arabic. They have, to a lesser extent, what English has - diversification. Multiple smaller countries speaking a language trumps one giant country, IMO, because when people are considering what new language to become proficient in they don’t first think “how many people use this language?” but “how many different places can I use it?”
No. The OP and the people who are following do no understand the position of the English language or even the idea of the 2nd language as the vehicular language. An error from being in a grand monolinguistic zone.
As clairobscur has noted, it is not even the case that in the European case, the larger regional languages are losing to the official national version (as like the Catalan, etc), where they have the critical mass. Without the aggressive repression in the France of the regional languages it would have been the same with the lanque d’oc.
There is no case in these instances where it makes sense to teach the children the English rather than at least the dominant national language. To think this is a path is to not understand the role of the vehicular language and to hugely over-estimate the daily usage of English. It also mistakes the slang and the fashionable borrowings from the English for the abandoning of the mother tongue. This is a complete error. Borrowing the English or other words in no way endangers a large dominent language and does not in any way indicate the language adoption.
There are cases where there is no dominant national language and the education is in French for example where in the urban areas there is the shift to a version of the French as a mother tongue, like the Gabon. But this is a rare thing.
China was but an example, and yes, there’s no guarantee that the lingua franca will be the language of the dominant economic power. But there’s no reason to assume that English will stay the lingua franca, either. Things change. Things always change.
Besides, in the 19th century English was “the most powerful nation on Earth” by a large margin. No comparison with the situation of the English-speaking world in the 20th century, with the ascent of the USA. Besides, English in fact did begin to displace French in the 19th century, in fact. By the late 19th, English was already a main business language. 30-40 years ago, French was still widely studied as first foreign language in Southern and Eastern Europe. It’s a long process that lasted 150 years or so.
Yes, I got that English is currently the “world language” . I challenge the idea that just because it is now, it will stay this way let alone become even more prominent.
And no reason why they would, either. Don’t you think that, as I wrote, if China becomes a massive economic powerhouse with a gigantic domestic market, people won’t learn Chinese to do business in China or with China? That Chinese people, be them businessmen, diplomats or tourists, will want and expect to find people speaking their language (in fact, it’s already an useful language if you work in the tourism industry in Europe)? That Chinese cultural production will be massive and might very well displace the USA as the main provider of pop culture?
The world seems to be on the path to become multipolar. With presumably China and India as main world powers, and and the currently dominating USA becoming a second rate power on par with the like of Brazil. Of course, things might change a lot, but it’s the direction we’re headed at the moment, so I don’t think it’s a safe assumption to state that English will somehow keep its current status, let alone become even more dominant.
Again assuming that progress in matter of automatic translation won’t make learning a foreign language obsolete (and that we don’t kill off ourselves, which also seems a distinct possibility to me)
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Yes, I got that English is currently the “world language” . I challenge the idea that just because it is now, it will stay this way let alone become even more prominent.
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Why wouldn’t it? I don’t see the US going down so hard that it becomes a non-factor, or another non-English speaking country becoming that level of dominant any time in the foreseeable future. Several of the nations rising speak English already. China, even if it somehow gets past the huge challenges and handicap the CCP gives it won’t be in a position to have it’s language take over as the lingua franca. What else is there? I don’t see German ever becoming an international language supplanting English. French isn’t going to at this stage. By the time the US’s run is done in another 50 or 100 years (or even in another 10 or 20) English will be much more entrenched than French ever was, and there is still a carry over for French out there…and this leaves aside what America becomes when it’s no longer the most dominant country on the planet and what countries like the UK, Canada, Australia etc become. I think English is going to be so pervasive that a large majority of humans on the planet will have a working knowledge of it as their second language at a minimum long before America is in real decline (assuming it is…I actually don’t think the US is in decline, quite the opposite despite that idiot we have as our President).
What do you posit as a possible successor to English and how would you see it gaining market share I suppose world wide?
Agreed and more to the point; English was the *lingua franca * at the time when mass global telecommunication began to be a thing. Once it’s established, its difficult to disestablish, even when the original political entity is dissolved.
Yes, and it is useful to observe that within the Islamic empires, the language replacement only occured in those areas where a sister or a cousin language was the majority language of the population - the Egyptian, the Aramaic and its sister languages, the Berber languages.
And even in this case, for the most distant languages like the Berber, even now the replacement is not complete, more than one thousand years later - and has only accelerated in all the cases in the modern era under the pressure of the modern centralized state education (à la mode française).
In the regions where it the major popular language was not a sister language or a cousin language, there was not replacement, only the influence in the vocabulary, and the Arabic remained only the vehicular language - the language for talking to those who do not speak your native dialect family… or for learning.
Yes, I think this is correct, both for the reason and method the English became quite the dominant vehicular language and that the path dependency will lead to the ongoing utilization, perhaps more so with the rise of other powers to render English less the American language…
The neutral 3rd party but heavily network effect enabled vehicular language has its own dynamic and that is something that can support expanded and continued English usage.
The OP (who it is noticed has the historical habit of the single post never return intervention so it is guessed will not return) and others are confusing the Vehicular language with the language replacement.
The way things look now everybody will eventually speak some form of English. For many it will remain a second language, but it is the de facto international language. However, things could change, personal real time translation devices will appear some day and the need to understand other languages will be greatly reduced. Even just in written form if we get to the point where a post on the Dope is automatically translated into another language, completely, providing appropriate substitutes for idioms, and picking up grammatical oddities, the motivation to learn any second language will be reduced.
Before Mandarin could become the language of the entire world, it would have to at least become the language of China, and it hasn’t managed that yet. China has something like 20 different major languages, and many Chinese people have something other than Mandarin as their primary or only language.
Impossible. Too difficult to become a (or the) lingua franca, and also despite the “It’s spoken by 1 billion people!” statistic often touted, it’s fairly limited to just China, Taiwan, Singapore and some other regions. It’s not like English which has a truly global reach.
I agree with those saying Mandarin is too difficult to become global. Learning it properly involves mass memorization of characters and mastering the pronunciation of tones. Clearly it’s not impossible, but very difficult past childhood. Compare that with English, which while sometimes wildly unphonetic, can be understood even when poorly spelled or pronounced.