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Have we reached peak English in the world?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- realusername 9y agoLanguages come and go, up until WWI, French was the global language. Only 50 years ago, knowing Russian was a massive asset and the language reached a lot of countries. Now English is the undisputed main one but there's indeed no guarantee it will stay that way, who knows what the future will be made of.
- icebraining 9y agoMy parents' generation never used French to the same degree that we use English today, though. Its marketing machines (such as Hollywood) are tremendous.
- Tharkun 9y agoEnglish language cultural exports are a large part of it, but so is the internet. I could speak/read/write English years before taking English classes in school. IRC and bulletin boards were largely to blame for that, much more so than movies/TV. I suppose kids these days have access to online content in whatever their native language is, but when I was growing English was the only option.
- paganel 9y agoIn these parts of the world (Romania, Eastern-Europe, granted, a very Francophile country back in the day) middle-class people were regularly using French as the means of personal communication in the inter-war period. Just recently I’ve seen a post-card sent by a Romanian husband to his Romanian wife from a Romanian seaside resort sometime around 1930 which was written entirely in French. Lots of first names were also being French-ified for written informal communication, like the Romanian Gheorghe being changed into the French Georges. Once the communists came to power after WW2 almost all of that vanished, partly because the newly arisen middle-classes were not as “cultured” as the inter-war middle-class (even though knowing French was still seen as you being “an intellectual”, so to speak). Once the communists fell and capitalism took over English sort of became lingua-franca for business communication, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any people using it for personal communication the same as they were using French before WW2. Not trying to refute your observation or anything, which I find entirely correct, just wanted to add a small piece of language trivia.
- icebraining 9y agoOh, no doubt about that; in Portugal our middle and upper classes were knee deep in French language and culture. One of our best writers wrote a lengthy text humorously complaining that "Portugal was a country translated from French". But this was still a small minority, even if influential, and even there actually knowing how to speak French wasn't universal.
- realusername 9y agoIf your parents are from Europe, there's a good chance that all the administrative papers (including driving licence) were available in French and a lot of the main buildings would have French signs at that time. Just look at the old train station of Sofia for example: https://24timezones.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/img_0033.jpg https://24timezones.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/img_0033.jpg, the new one has English instead of French now.
- lucozade 9y ago> French was the global language It wasn't, it was just the primary language for diplomacy. Other languages were the de facto standard for other things e.g. English for maritime usage, German for science and maths. What's unusual about the current situation is that English dominates in the fields that have the most global reach: international trade, music/film/TV and technology. This is almost exclusively due to US hegemony in these fields for the last 70 odd years. What is also unusual about the current situation is how quickly things can change on a global scale. As such, I also don't see any reason to believe that English will dominate indefinitely. But I also see no reason why we'll move to another single, hegemonic language. Dominant languages might split by function again or special purpose languages may spring up. I see embryonic versions of the latter in my children's electronic communications.
- pimmen 9y agoYes, this is something I think will be more likely; English might lose its grasp of area A to one language and lose area B to another language. I don't think we'll see one national language dominate again for a long time because this is a globalized post-industrial world, I don't think we'll see the rapid transformation of just one part of the world like the 19th and 20th century again.
- 100k 9y agoThe author of this article wrote a very interesting book about the connection between language and empire, "Empires of the Word". https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0060935723 https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/d... It is really interesting to read about how languages outlast their cultures. Latin comes to mind of course, but as the book discusses this was also the case with Sumerian and others.
- bartart 9y agoI hope this will matter less (if it even matters now) once automatic translation of web pages gets good enough and those google auto translate earbuds actually start to work
- 100k 9y agoThe author makes the argument that automatic translation could prevent the rise of a new lingua franca: https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/0802717713 https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/...
- Grue3 9y agoAutomatic translation requires Strong AI. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winograd_Schema_Challenge
- adrianN 9y agoThis article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted forever before". I really doubt that English will be supplanted by Chinese, Chinese is way too hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness of their horrible writing system. The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese loanwords. The world will never learn their characters.
- realusername 9y ago> The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese loanwords I could really see Mandarin take off if they would adopt a writing system similar to Vietnamese.
- PinkMilkshake 9y agoI don't think that would help. Chinese is very heavy on homophones and the characters allow meaning differentiation. In spoken Chinese you have to rely on context. Written and spoken Chinese seem tightly coupled.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoContext is just as present in writing as it is in speech.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- dibujante 9y agoNo, not really. Chinese characters use different characters / radicals to distinguish homophones in a way that makes writing much easier to understand if you're shakier on the context.
- 9y ago
- cobbzilla 9y agoEnglish is a lot like x86: yeah it's got a lot of warts but it's ubiquitous and fairly simple to learn the basics.
- brisance 9y agoIt’s not that simple. There are quite a few definitions of an epithet. ;) https://youtu.be/RAGcDi0DRtU https://youtu.be/RAGcDi0DRtU
- darklajid 9y agoThe biggest problem English has in my opinion is that you can't guess what a word is pronounced like..
- russellbeattie 9y agoThat's its primary strength as well, as it means that English can adopt a word from any other language and expand without causing any linguistic issues. Most languages are stunted by their formality and rules, but English is already a mongrel. We're happy to import tortilla, hors d’oeuvre, origami, sheikh, schadenfreude and hundreds of other words without a thought, as well as make up new ones on a yearly basis (vape, selfie, etc.). Not many other languages are so flexible, as frustrating as it may be. Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.
- s17n 9y agoLoan words are a universal phenomenon.
- IshKebab 9y agoYeah but he's saying they break pronunciation rules in other languages. They don't in English because the pronunciation is already all over the place. Also, they aren't universal - France tries really really hard to avoid them. They'll make up new French words for concepts that English would just import.
- pretendscholar 9y agoIm still hoping a constructed language like esperanto takes the mantel but that is such a pipe dream.
- r00fus 9y agoI see language adoption similar to currency adoption. Mainly through fiat power and leverage of network effects.
- timbit42 9y agoWhat? Not Toki Pona?
- tomcooks 9y agoI think the world is more likely to end up using a simplified mashup of most used languages rather than a new one, especially Esperanto with all its faults.
- jsnider3 9y agoSounds like interlingua.
- oceanman888 9y agoAt the moment, the kind of Chinese you would want to talk to, almost always speaks English.(Except when you are sourcing parts in Shenzhen)
- thaumasiotes 9y agoMy exposure to Chinese people is heavily biased towards (1) highly educated youth who (2) feel like talking with foreigners. Despite that, it's very clear that this extremely selected population displays the full range of English ability, from native-level proficiency through near-total inability to speak or understand. Drop down to students at a merely second-tier university, or people a little older, or top-tier students who don't bother to approach foreigners because they know there's no hope, and you'll find people with even less English than that.
- oceanman888 9y agoNot considering Chinese who spend majority of his life outside of china, Ones overall competence correlates with the mastery of English. Bad English means: My parents neglected or could not pay for good education. Sadly this is some-what true for this generation.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoCorrelates, yes. But one of the best students I've met, who in a mock visa interview answered the question "it costs a lot of money to live in America. Can you afford it?" with "we have a hundred million RMB", was basically unable to function in conversation. (In the same interview, which was meant to be conducted in English, more than three quarters of her responses were just "什么意思？".) Some people aren't interested in learning languages. Some people have tremendous difficulty.
- whorleater 9y agoWhat is "the kind of Chinese you would want to talk to"?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Viliam1234 9y agoIt is all about "what language do I need to learn to have a good income". The difficulty of language matters little, as long as speaking the language badly is still more profitable than not speaking it at all. That is partially about economic power (if your country offers many good jobs, people near you have an incentive to learn your language), and partially about military power (if you can make another country speak your language at gunpoint, at least in government-related jobs, their economical power becomes another argument for learning your language). Therefore the popularity of Chinese will depend on how easy it will be for people who learn Chinese to increase their income. Compared with the expected increase of income from learning English. Argument "but most important people in China speak English anyway" is less relevant if learning Chinese provides you even better advantage from cooperating with them. For example, most people in Germany speak English, but I suppose that being fluent in German still makes it easier to find a job in Germany.
- cm2187 9y agoSo you have to learn German to work better in Germany, and French in France. You can list every country like that. But if you want to work with anyone in the world with one language, that's english. And that's its power, the new latin. I can see some people learning a specific language because they plan to work with/in a specific country but I can't think of any language that seriously rivals english as a universal language.
- vixen99 9y agoGerman, French, English and Latin.
- tomcooks 9y agoSide note rant on languages: the fact that on Duolingo there are more people willing to learn made up languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, rather than Arabic, says a lot about how invested many anglophones are about opening up towards other cultures. Hopefully peak English has been reached.
- krapp 9y ago>Side note rant on languages: the fact that on Duolingo there are more people willing to learn made up languages like Klingon or Game of Thrones, rather than Arabic, Portuguese, Mandarin or Spanish, says a lot about how invested many anglophones are about opening up towards other cultures. I would rather assume that it says a lot about how invested they are in popular culture and casual learning, because learning Klingon might actually be a fun diversion, and a lot less effort than learning Mandarin or Arabic.
- krageon 9y agoI don't understand why you would pick Arabic as an example here. There are languages you could take as alternatives to the mentioned fantasy languages (Mandarin, German if you read a lot of technical literature, etc) that are significantly more relevant and likely to be useful online.
- tomcooks 9y agoSurely the Arab world has no use online, especially lately /s
- strictnein 9y agoConsidering that Duolingo doesn't even have an Arabic course yet and won't until August... https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online https://www.duolingo.com/course/ar/en/Learn-Arabic-Online
- tomcooks 9y agoConsidering they postponed it for years maybe that's my point?
- diego_moita 9y agoNo, not even close to that. English has 2 strengths very hard to overcome: it is both "cool" and useful. And those strengths are increasing a lot, compared to other languages. There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this brainwashing. And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that: it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries, people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English. Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling language.
- justherefortart 9y agoWhen I shop for guitars I will look at Japanese sites for Ibanez models not offered in the US. The amount of English on their websites is surprising. Japanese Example: http://www.ibanez.co.jp/index.html http://www.ibanez.co.jp/index.html Chinese Example: http://www.ibanez.com/cn/ http://www.ibanez.com/cn/
- woodandsteel 9y agoMy favorite drummer is Japanese, but much of her website is in English http://kanadesato.wixsite.com/home/profile http://kanadesato.wixsite.com/home/profile
- wenc 9y ago> Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages" When I was visiting Portugal I stayed with two people, one from Portugal and the other from Spain. They had been living together for months before I joined them, and speaking to each other in their native languages. I was a unilingual Anglophone, and to accommodate me, they both spoke English in my presence. It was only through the medium of English that they discovered that they had misunderstood each other for months about various things. The fact that Spanish and Portuguese were similar lulled them in to a false sense of comprehension, when in fact there are many false friends (cognates) and divergent nuances. I'm told this happens a lot among Scandinavians too, and Danish is known to be especially difficult for Norwegians and Swedes to comprehend completely, so many fall back on English to avoid misunderstandings.
- zwieback 9y agoI vote for English as a global standard everywhere and also ASCII only. We never really needed more, bye bye umlauts, dreierle-S, emojis and all that.
- pimmen 9y agoToo much pop culture outside of the US is produced in English even though it's consumed mostly by non-english speaking markets. Swedish music, for example. And lets not forget that software engineering's lingua franca is still English, regardless of where the finished product will be consumed. China might supplant the US as the consumer market but it will take a long time for the rest of the world to adapt to its language. Japanese, German and Russian doesn't even hold a candle to English dominance during the 20th century even though the German and Japanese economy were going very strong and the Soviet Union had a very powerful presence. Even in Finland English edged out Russian.
- hsivonen 9y agoHow you mean "even in Finland" and "edged out"? Finland resisted Russification when under Russian rule and was more on the Swedish and German language orbit before English took over after WWII.
- pimmen 9y agoBecause after WWII Finland was very influenced by the Soviet Union. Finland tried to avoid enacting or supporting policies that opposed the Soviet Union during the cold war, especially during the first half when the USSR was Finland's largest market. There's even a word for it, "Finlandization", which means not upsetting the super power right next door even though you secretly really don't like it. But since Finland wanted to have access to the global, capitalist market English was the way forward. I don't think national pride made them break away from the Soviet sphere of influence it was money, and English is still the language of global business. Until the opportunity cost of learning some other language than English for your field is too big countries will most likely stick with English.
- mistrial9 9y agoI see plenty of talk here about a "world" or dominant spoken language, and nothing so far about the extinction of viable languages now.. how quick people are to pile on to commonality .. many possible things to say but leave it there for now
- exodust 9y ago> "Chinese, too, is great." What an awkward way to end the article. What does he mean? Is he telling us his opinion of the language with one word, "great"? Perhaps as an afterthought he added that line in case anyone wondered whether he thought the language was "great" or "not great", so he's kindly cleared up any confusion about that!
- eloff 9y agoI can't disagree with this more strongly. Not only is it a useless opinion piece with not a bit of data to support the conclusions drawn, but I'm certain it's dead wrong to boot. English is the beginnings of a global language. The language of human beings, rather than just the language of a particular culture or nationality. More people speak English than any other language. More people are learning English as second language than any other language. It's the defacto language of international business, the sky, the sea, of science, of movies, television, and games, and most importantly of the internet itself. There is more information available on any topic, in English, on the internet than any other. To the point that if you don't know how to search in English and read in English, you're at a serious information disadvantage. This is why for software developers, where information is king, English is the lingua franca. Look at us, here we are people from all over the world, and we're all communicating in English because it's the common denominator. It has little to do with the relative economic power of England and America at this point. In terms this group will relate to - English has stronger network effects going for it than any other language - and I expect its importance to only increase going forward.