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English is the worlds most important language. 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4%. People in other countries

English is the worlds most important language. 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4%. People in other countries learn it just to study things not related to English, like Medicine. The advantages gained by say a French speaker learning English are huge. An English speaker learning French, or even Mandarin? Really not so much. This attitude of "those Europeans are so much more intelligent than us, look at all the languages they know" really needs to die. They know English because they need it and it gives them an advantage. Or often just because they want to watch popular TV shows. BTW English is the most commonly language spoken in Europe as well. The days of Europeans learning the languages of their neighbours is largely over; Norwegians and Swedes, Germans and Dutchmen are much more likely to converse in English than to know each others languages. In your hypothetical scenario, the person would have almost certainly tried the national language first, then English.

flukus 10y ago
> or even Mandarin? Really not so much Not right now, I can easily see that being different within the next century though. Probably too late for us, but not for our children and grand children.
- deleted 10y ago
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- lacampbell 10y ago
  Why do you expect the language of a middle-income country with a rapidly aging population and unsustainable economic model to somehow become more useful in the next 100 years? There's also the uncomfortable fact that many Chinese people just think it's funny that a foreigner speaks their language, or they feel like they have something over you because you have to talk to them on their terms. (I say this as a Mandarin learner, btw)
  - flukus 10y ago
    Because that middle income country is the second biggest economy in the world and could be number one in the next century.
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      In the next century, UN projections predict that the population of China will have dropped to 940 million, from its current value of 1,340 million. [1] More immediately, Chinas population will peak in 15 years or so, which means its labour pool is already shrinking. Many East Asian countries are facing the same issue of course (South Korea, Taiwan) and Japan is dealing with it already. But these countries are all high income democracies - how will a middle income dictatorship deal with a rapidly aging population? How can they push through that to become even more economically productive, as you envision? I don't see it. Chinas official GDP figures are hugely questionable btw, at least one province has been caught fabricating data http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-admits-it-fabricated-economic-data-three-years http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-ad... [2] I don't know why so many people seem to extrapolate Chinas rise in the past few decades out indefinitely into the future. I don't see it ever becoming a high income country - at least not under its current system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Population_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati... [2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-admits-it-fabricated-economic-data-three-years http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-ad...
xiaoma 10y ago
Your stats are off. The Chinese-language internet is far larger than the Russian-language internet. Take a quick look at the Alexa top 500 sites.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/a... This is where I got it from. If you have a better source I'd like to see it.
  - xiaoma 10y ago
    I already did give you a better source in my previous comment. Here's another that measures something slightly different. It took all of 10 seconds to google: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm China has nearly a billion regular internet users and there are over a hundred million overseas Chinese speakers. Finding a "source" on the internet is great and all but at least run it past a basic sanity check. Given the enormous population gap, how could Russian possibly have more of an internet presence than Chinese?
    - lacampbell 10y ago
      Well for one thing, our stats are about completely different things. Mine are about the language of web sites. Yours is about the language of web users. So yes, an orange is different to an apple. I agree.
      - xiaoma 10y ago
        I'm sorry but 2% is way off. Far more web sites than that are Chinese. Your "stats" were calculated from total domains and the data from Alexa. While Alexa is good for the highest traffic sites, not that many Chinese internet users install an Alexa toolbar and not that many web masters install any of the tracking tools Alexa pulls from. The Chinese internet is fairly unique, has different search engines, has social media sites and has different analytics providers. FWIW: I have worked in both US and Chinese tech companies and have familiarity with both ecosystems.
wasabian 10y ago
Norwegians and Swedes are more likely to converse using their own languages rather than using English. Source: I'm Norwegian.
- lacampbell 10y ago
  I stand corrected. I did know quite a few Danes who would use English to converse with their Northern neighbours. Either they were outliers, or I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal.
  - abraves10001 10y ago
    Anecdote Time: So, I am an American who lived in Sweden for roughly 4 years, long enough to consider myself mostly fluent (reading novels, talking about relatively high level political science questions in Swedish, etc.) and only agree partially with the comment above yours. Norwegians and Swedes would speak in their native tongues regularly but a lot of the time, especially if either person was from a region with a distinct accent (Skåne, i'm looking at you), they would transition to English. As for Danes, that is a different boat. Their written language is extremely similar to Swedish but their pronunciation is far more guttural and hard to understand for many Swedes. I went to Copenhagen with a bunch of Swedes and they spoke almost exclusively English to the Danes.
    - raattgift 10y ago
      > Skåne, i'm looking at you With a view to stamping out the dialect? You're a real 08er, indeed. :^)
  - raattgift 10y ago
    > norse languages "Scandinavian" languages, please. Or even mainland Scandinavian, to distinguish from the (not very mutually intelligible) insular Scandinavian in the Faroes and on Iceland. > I did know quite a few Danes That last word is the explanation. :-) More below. > I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal. Swedes and Norwegians have little trouble talking with one another in their own languages. Norwegian written language looks more similar to Danish (indeed, bokmål is highly similar) in that a Dane would have no trouble reading Norwegian or vice-versa. Written Swedish differs in more than just the last three letters of the alphabet. Spoken Danish is a whole other animal. It works out when people try to speak as standardly as possible. Norwegians and Swedes (except some from the very south of Sweden) will struggle with ordinary spoken Danish, and are even likely to turn on subtitling when watching Danish TV shows (likewise there will be Danish subtitling of some Swedish shows). In some technical settings you'll see more use of English among Scandinavians because there is a non-commonality of terms, and of course it is simply more polite to talk in English when talking someone whose only common language (or indeed only language) is English, and it is especially Danish to do so in order to avoid excluding anyone. That may have coloured your impression.
ramblerman 10y ago
You have boiled the argument down to one of pure economic utility. Learning a language: - still opens up parts of the world for travel or living. - can give you a different mindset/toolset, think a functional programming language vs an OO one albeit not quite that drastic. - is good for the brain going into old age I haven't heard any intelligence arguments before, that just seems like an insecurity, and not a reason to learn/or not learn a language.
touristtam 10y ago
> 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4% Quantity !== Quality As someone who can read/write in three western languages, I trawl the relevant part of the internet for answers instead of being stuck on the English-speaking only or having to relying on still unreliable automated translators. By the way a good share of the corpus for things like physics have been written in other language than english before english was the international trade language. So I guess there is an incentive to learn language like german, french or latin.

flukus 10y ago

> or even Mandarin? Really not so much Not right now, I can easily see that being different within the next century though. Probably too late for us, but not for our children and grand children.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
lacampbell 10y ago
Why do you expect the language of a middle-income country with a rapidly aging population and unsustainable economic model to somehow become more useful in the next 100 years? There's also the uncomfortable fact that many Chinese people just think it's funny that a foreigner speaks their language, or they feel like they have something over you because you have to talk to them on their terms. (I say this as a Mandarin learner, btw)
- flukus 10y ago
  Because that middle income country is the second biggest economy in the world and could be number one in the next century.
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    In the next century, UN projections predict that the population of China will have dropped to 940 million, from its current value of 1,340 million. [1] More immediately, Chinas population will peak in 15 years or so, which means its labour pool is already shrinking. Many East Asian countries are facing the same issue of course (South Korea, Taiwan) and Japan is dealing with it already. But these countries are all high income democracies - how will a middle income dictatorship deal with a rapidly aging population? How can they push through that to become even more economically productive, as you envision? I don't see it. Chinas official GDP figures are hugely questionable btw, at least one province has been caught fabricating data http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-admits-it-fabricated-economic-data-three-years http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-ad... [2] I don't know why so many people seem to extrapolate Chinas rise in the past few decades out indefinitely into the future. I don't see it ever becoming a high income country - at least not under its current system. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Population_projection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Populati... [2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-admits-it-fabricated-economic-data-three-years http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-18/chinese-province-ad...

xiaoma 10y ago

Your stats are off. The Chinese-language internet is far larger than the Russian-language internet. Take a quick look at the Alexa top 500 sites.

lacampbell 10y ago
https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/all https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/content_language/a... This is where I got it from. If you have a better source I'd like to see it.
- xiaoma 10y ago
  I already did give you a better source in my previous comment. Here's another that measures something slightly different. It took all of 10 seconds to google: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm China has nearly a billion regular internet users and there are over a hundred million overseas Chinese speakers. Finding a "source" on the internet is great and all but at least run it past a basic sanity check. Given the enormous population gap, how could Russian possibly have more of an internet presence than Chinese?
  - lacampbell 10y ago
    Well for one thing, our stats are about completely different things. Mine are about the language of web sites. Yours is about the language of web users. So yes, an orange is different to an apple. I agree.
    - xiaoma 10y ago
      I'm sorry but 2% is way off. Far more web sites than that are Chinese. Your "stats" were calculated from total domains and the data from Alexa. While Alexa is good for the highest traffic sites, not that many Chinese internet users install an Alexa toolbar and not that many web masters install any of the tracking tools Alexa pulls from. The Chinese internet is fairly unique, has different search engines, has social media sites and has different analytics providers. FWIW: I have worked in both US and Chinese tech companies and have familiarity with both ecosystems.

wasabian 10y ago

Norwegians and Swedes are more likely to converse using their own languages rather than using English. Source: I'm Norwegian.

lacampbell 10y ago
I stand corrected. I did know quite a few Danes who would use English to converse with their Northern neighbours. Either they were outliers, or I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal.
- abraves10001 10y ago
  Anecdote Time: So, I am an American who lived in Sweden for roughly 4 years, long enough to consider myself mostly fluent (reading novels, talking about relatively high level political science questions in Swedish, etc.) and only agree partially with the comment above yours. Norwegians and Swedes would speak in their native tongues regularly but a lot of the time, especially if either person was from a region with a distinct accent (Skåne, i'm looking at you), they would transition to English. As for Danes, that is a different boat. Their written language is extremely similar to Swedish but their pronunciation is far more guttural and hard to understand for many Swedes. I went to Copenhagen with a bunch of Swedes and they spoke almost exclusively English to the Danes.
  - raattgift 10y ago
    > Skåne, i'm looking at you With a view to stamping out the dialect? You're a real 08er, indeed. :^)
- raattgift 10y ago
  > norse languages "Scandinavian" languages, please. Or even mainland Scandinavian, to distinguish from the (not very mutually intelligible) insular Scandinavian in the Faroes and on Iceland. > I did know quite a few Danes That last word is the explanation. :-) More below. > I assumed the differences between the three big norse languages were roughly equal. Swedes and Norwegians have little trouble talking with one another in their own languages. Norwegian written language looks more similar to Danish (indeed, bokmål is highly similar) in that a Dane would have no trouble reading Norwegian or vice-versa. Written Swedish differs in more than just the last three letters of the alphabet. Spoken Danish is a whole other animal. It works out when people try to speak as standardly as possible. Norwegians and Swedes (except some from the very south of Sweden) will struggle with ordinary spoken Danish, and are even likely to turn on subtitling when watching Danish TV shows (likewise there will be Danish subtitling of some Swedish shows). In some technical settings you'll see more use of English among Scandinavians because there is a non-commonality of terms, and of course it is simply more polite to talk in English when talking someone whose only common language (or indeed only language) is English, and it is especially Danish to do so in order to avoid excluding anyone. That may have coloured your impression.

ramblerman 10y ago

You have boiled the argument down to one of pure economic utility. Learning a language: - still opens up parts of the world for travel or living. - can give you a different mindset/toolset, think a functional programming language vs an OO one albeit not quite that drastic. - is good for the brain going into old age I haven't heard any intelligence arguments before, that just seems like an insecurity, and not a reason to learn/or not learn a language.

touristtam 10y ago

> 52.3% of websites pages are in English, the next highest percentage is Russian at 5.4% Quantity !== Quality As someone who can read/write in three western languages, I trawl the relevant part of the internet for answers instead of being stuck on the English-speaking only or having to relying on still unreliable automated translators. By the way a good share of the corpus for things like physics have been written in other language than english before english was the international trade language. So I guess there is an incentive to learn language like german, french or latin.