I think that Mandarin also suffers from the fact most native Mandarin speakers who have cause to communicate with non-Mandarin speakers prefer to learn the other language. I know a guy who does significant business in China, and has for decades. Years ago he was having dinner with some of his Chinese business associates and he mentioned he had been slowly trying to learn Mandarin. He said the reaction wasn’t what he’d have expected, they literally said, “Why would you do that?” they basically viewed it as weird that a foreigner would want to learn their language, and actively expected that for doing international business they were going to learn and use English. It’s kind of like a 180 from the French position, the educated elites and upper middle class in China really value learning and being able to use English, there is little cache or appeal at least among those sorts in interacting with a white dude who speaks Mandarin.
I don’t think it’d go so far as to be a negative to know the language, but it’s more or less “discouraged.”
The Chinese effect really isn’t working out that way though, and isn’t likely to ever, to be honest. Remember that India has a ton of English speakers for historical reasons and that’s likely not going away–particularly among the educated/business class Indians. Since the business language of Europe is English, and obviously it is English for America and then the other smaller countries in the Anglosphere, it’s highly unlikely Chinese business is ever more important than all the Anglosphere + Europe + India. Keep in mind India has almost as many people as China and is growing faster, and its economy is growing fast as well.
It’s worth noting that vernacular Latin had been dead for a thousand years at the point it was still a very common language for science/Church affairs (which at the time constituted a form of proto-continental elite), even if America declines (which it isn’t, really), there’s no reason to assume an ascendant Chinese language takes the current place of English. If anything Chinese modernization and openness has actually had the opposite effect. How many English speakers would you guess lived in mainland China in 1975 versus today? The entire current generation of college bound Chinese are all learning English.
Upper class Chinese tend to be very patriotic, but they don’t tend to be as nationalist as most Europeans, at least that I’ve observed. They remind me a lot of what we read about the Japanese being like in the late 19th century. They really want to emulate Western styles and customs in a lot of ways. They love to travel to Europe and America to spend big money in upscale stores and all that. That’s also a major factor I think in why the Chinese aren’t/won’t push Mandarin or aggressively defend it even the way the French have their language.
Japan ultimately developed quite differently because it became a hyper-nationalist country.
China is a little different because the country has long promoted loyalty to the State and Communist Party, while the minority ethnicities in China have always received questionable treatment, the Chinese government has long tried to emphasize the importance of the State and Party and to a degree Chinese ethnic nationalism would potentially get in the way of that. Mind that after the Communists took power in 1911 they redefined the “Chinese nation” to include ethnicities other than Han Chinese, specifically to foster state loyalty/unity.
Also note the funny thing that back when “lingua franca” was used, it wasn’t the native language of anybody. It was a generalized and simplified Romance language, but it wasn’t Latin, it wasn’t Castilian, it wasn’t Catalan, it wasn’t Provencal, it wasn’t any of the Italian dialects.
So you have an auxiliary language that is understandable by lots of people, but not natively spoken by anyone. Maybe there should be a movement to bring back an “international romance”.
But for English to really take over the world you’d have to have people all over the world deciding to raise their children as English speakers. This happened with things like Spanish and English in the Americas, there are still some native speakers of native American languages but European languages have nearly completely replaced them. Or English replacing Irish and Welsh.
But take a look at Quebec, for crying out loud. They’ve been ruled by Anglophones for 200 years, and still exist. I guess it’s easier if the ruling majority doesn’t make it illegal to teach school in the minority language.
Or contrariwise, Greek used to be the international language of the Eastern Mediterranean for a thousand years, surviving the comings and goings of various empires. But then along came the Arabs and Turks and the fall of the Byzantine Empire. And all the Greek speaking communities outside of Greece have nearly vanished.
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But for English to really take over the world you’d have to have people all over the world deciding to raise their children as English speakers.
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I don’t see how this follows, to be honest. English has pretty much already taken over the world (1.5 billion people speak it fluently already, depending on how you define ‘fluently’ I guess). It doesn’t have to be every person’s primary language for it to take over, just has to be a common language that people around the globe know and use to communicate with each other when they don’t know each other’s native language…which it is already and will become more so in the future.
Agreed. I think English is likely to remain the main international language in the forseeable future. The rise of China probably will not change this. But the other international languages (such as Arabic, Spanish, Russian, French, etc.) will probably maintain their positions. And most countries are very unlikely to replace their official language with English. Why would they?
Some countries that have as their official language a colonial language that’s not the first language of the population might decide to replace it with English. I think Rwanda did something like this, replacing French with English (or adding English as official alongside French), but my understanding is that this was due to part of Rwanda’s political class spending time in Ugandan refugee camps, where they spoke English but no French. So it was based on local and not global factors.
In 100 years or so, we’ll have lost quite a bit of linguistic diversity, since many languages are endangered right now. But languages that currently have official status in some country, and even a good number that don’t, will still exist. And 100 years is about as far as we can make even slightly meaningful predictions.
I do wonder about Basque, though. It is spoken in the countryside in the Spanish Basque country, but the cities, like Bilbao, seem to be very much Spanish (Castillan)-speaking. I wonder if it’s likely to become endangered in the near future.
Even then, teaching school in French was for a time made illegal in other Canadian provinces, like Ontario and Manitoba (where I now live). And yet, these provinces still have French-speaking minorities. (These minorities, however, are somewhat more likely to eventually disappear due to insufficient numbers.)
Regarding Canadians and their accent, I think the Canadian accent is already very close to, if not indistinguishable from, the general American accent. Jim Carrey, William Shatner (who could easily pass as being from Iowa), John Candy, etc. sound no different to me than American actors. I don’t think it’s limited to actors either, as when I’ve met people from Canada, I had no idea they were from another country based on their accent. On the other hand, British and Australian people definitely have a different accent to my ear, whether they be famous actors (excepting Hugh Laurie in his role as House) or people I actually know.
There are some slight differences, but I agree with you that most Canadians do not have accents that are instantly noticeable. Words like “sorry” and “progress” are sometimes pronounced differently though.
Either way, Canadian English is definitely part of the same family as the US dialects. It has a lot in common with the American English spoken in the Western and North Central regions.
“Small Germanic tribes” covered more than half of Europe, and even into Africa. That one branch of their languages should come to dominate the world isn’t really surprising - they always spread out to dominate as much as they could in ancient times, too.
Yeah, how is it any different from
i) A tiny city in Italy, west of anywhere remotely civiliszed, becoming Rome
ii) A Band few small tribes, conquering one ancient empire and half of another and taking bits from a third, i.e Arabs
This is changing fast, though. The old people are dying off. Anyone that’s university-educated is of necessity educated in Mandarin. It might be their second language, but that’s no matter.
Like the USA, Canada has a few regional English accents. I can pick out someone from Ontario in a heartbeat. I won’t actually know they’re from Ontario per se, but I’ll know they’re Canadian.
Not in eras of global communication. English won’t wipe out everything else, as some posit, but it will remain the international language from here on out through sheer inertia.
I was speaking specifically of the language of the Angles and Saxons. Of course if you extend it to mean all Germanic tribes it becomes unremarkable, just as it would become even more unremarkable if you extended it to all tribes which spoke Indo-European languages. You completely missed my point by interpreting tribe/tribes as all Germanic tribes rather than two of them.
The numbers would disagree with you (link to wiki article on World’s largest empires), and that has to be a major point. English isn’t dominant just because of America, OR the British Empire, but the fact that it’s reach coincided with both the Industrial Revolution, the age of empire and the communications revolution.
It’s hard to imagine another language combining the forces of global expansion, communication and commerce to anything like the same extent again.
As AK cited, Rome, the small unremarkable city of the small unremarkable Latin tribe on the fringes of the civilized, without any remarkable resources…
The Arabs, the small unremarkable group…
In fact it is actually even less accurate as the English many many centuries after the langauge ceased to be that of the small Germanic tribes and only after the island was inetraged into the European state system by the conquest of the French speaking Normans and after the profound language changes…
The spread of the English is much less surprising than the spread of the Arabic or even the Roman language.
Nope. Why wouldn’t we be seeing it already, India produces more movies than anybody and China has the second biggest economy. Yet virtually none of their pop culture is exported globally. Both are just seriously…uncool