4 ms·

I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish. If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, i

I'm betting this is going to flip around in the next eighty years or so, and not towards Spanish. If China's economy doesn't crash and burn (and, if it does, if it does not fail to rise again from the ashes like ours did after the Great Depression), Chinese is likely to become an important trade language. It's a difficult language, but then again - for different reasons - so is English. I'm placing my bets that within a century, there will be two primary trade languages (Chinese, probably Mandarin but also likely Cantonese), and English. And perhaps, a century or so after that, simply a pidgin of the two. The way global communications is bringing people closer cognitively will effectively starve out other languages. People will still speak them - likely limited to their local social groups (family, friends, et cetera), but fall to a global trade language (pidgin of English+Chinese) for nearly every other encounter. In some ways, this may be extremely interesting from a linguistics standpoint: Everyone will speak a common language, but there will be more and more language-isolates, as individual social circles become more insulated from each other by the global trade language.

eru 17y ago
Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.
- sirdavidof 17y ago
  Yes, but French is arguably fading much more quickly. It's easy to overlook where the words lingua franca originally came from.
  - eru 17y ago
    Not from French. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca) I can't say much about French. I do know that German is alive and kicking.
nfnaaron 17y ago
You may be right, I'm not so sure. Chinese is difficult, not just because tones (~4 in Mandarin, ~8(?) in Cantonese) are important for meaning, but because you can't easily fake it or guess when you're reading or writing. The written language is character based, so you can't just spell out the sound of a new word, you have to know it. There are structural parts of some characters that can help you guess, but that's it. So, I think, China is going to have to be almost as powerful in the rest of the world as they are in their own country before people are going to feel it's worth the effort to learn Chinese.
sirdavidof 17y ago
It's hard to be objective about these things as someone who only speaks one language natively (like me), but I suspect that English does have more advantages as an international language than simply being the tongue of the world's biggest economic power. There are many things about English that are difficult, if not infuriating for those learning it (spellings, irregular declinations, phrasal verbs, etc), but it is also a language that is quite easy to gain a basic grasp of. It has much more simplified grammar than most other European languages, for example, and even if spoken badly it is quite often intelligible. I had a friend who taught English in Greece, and she used to say that learning English was like trying to hold sand in your hand: cup it lightly and it's easy; try to hold it tightly and it's apt to slip through your fingers. I'm sure many East Asians would disagree with me on how easy English is though, so maybe I'm being parochial.
tokenadult 17y ago
I'm posting as a Chinese (second-language) speaker here who grew up speaking English and who has endeavored to maintain a bilingual home in the United States. Amazingly, only just more than half the population of China itself is conversant in Modern Standard Chinese. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... So Chinese still has to gain a lot of use at home before it can gain major use abroad. Several of the other comments about the importance of network effects in favoring one language rather than another show what a tremendous head start English has as the interlanguage for varied ethnic groups all over the world.

eru 17y ago

Interesting. But I doubt it will be that simple. Even if the Chinese will overshadow everything else in a few years, English will stay the dominant language in the western world. Latin limped on far over thousand years after the fall of its empire.

sirdavidof 17y ago
Yes, but French is arguably fading much more quickly. It's easy to overlook where the words lingua franca originally came from.
- eru 17y ago
  Not from French. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_franca) I can't say much about French. I do know that German is alive and kicking.

nfnaaron 17y ago

You may be right, I'm not so sure. Chinese is difficult, not just because tones (~4 in Mandarin, ~8(?) in Cantonese) are important for meaning, but because you can't easily fake it or guess when you're reading or writing. The written language is character based, so you can't just spell out the sound of a new word, you have to know it. There are structural parts of some characters that can help you guess, but that's it. So, I think, China is going to have to be almost as powerful in the rest of the world as they are in their own country before people are going to feel it's worth the effort to learn Chinese.

sirdavidof 17y ago

It's hard to be objective about these things as someone who only speaks one language natively (like me), but I suspect that English does have more advantages as an international language than simply being the tongue of the world's biggest economic power. There are many things about English that are difficult, if not infuriating for those learning it (spellings, irregular declinations, phrasal verbs, etc), but it is also a language that is quite easy to gain a basic grasp of. It has much more simplified grammar than most other European languages, for example, and even if spoken badly it is quite often intelligible. I had a friend who taught English in Greece, and she used to say that learning English was like trying to hold sand in your hand: cup it lightly and it's easy; try to hold it tightly and it's apt to slip through your fingers. I'm sure many East Asians would disagree with me on how easy English is though, so maybe I'm being parochial.

tokenadult 17y ago

I'm posting as a Chinese (second-language) speaker here who grew up speaking English and who has endeavored to maintain a bilingual home in the United States. Amazingly, only just more than half the population of China itself is conversant in Modern Standard Chinese. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... So Chinese still has to gain a lot of use at home before it can gain major use abroad. Several of the other comments about the importance of network effects in favoring one language rather than another show what a tremendous head start English has as the interlanguage for varied ethnic groups all over the world.