6 ms·

The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via m

by rofo1 7y ago

The language of our time is English. There's just no disputing that. You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world via music and movies, and so on, and so on, but it doesn't change that fact. We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? The point of using a language in the first place is to understand each other. Everyone learning a new language that will just substitute English would be an immense waste of time.

NotPaidToPost 7y ago
> We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? It's extremely offensive to suggest that English is progress and other languages are a 'regression'.
- Majestic121 7y ago
  I think the progress part is about having a common language, not about this common language being English. If the common language was wolof, people moving back to their own (Spanish, French, German, whatever) would be regression, as now a discussion between French, Spanish and German people would be much much harder to have.
  - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
    Well, the wording is rather clear that it was about English. Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.
    - jobigoud 7y ago
      Adopting another language as our lingua franca when English is already filling that role would be a regression. It's not saying other languages are inferior per se, they might be superior. But using any other would be an inferior choice now. It doesn't mean we can't add local flavors to it. I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication is hard enough that we don't need artificial complications. Let's tackle more interesting problems. Same reason we should use a single measurement units system, mains current standard, a single currency, etc.
      - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
        'move on as a species'? How arrogant and offensive is that? Basically a cultural genocide. A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.
louthy 7y ago
> You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.
- bhaak 7y ago
  > Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause. If this were the reason, then English should already have been the lingua franca in 1900. But it wasn't. But the previous spreading of the English language by the English Empire certainly helped when the US emerged as one of the main beneficiary of WW2.
- rofo1 7y ago
  British empire was (almost) 1/4 - it was never close to 1/3 of the world. Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin. After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further. We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.
  - rocqua 7y ago
    > and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world I doubt it was intentional. Seems like it was a nice side-effect at most.
    - rofo1 7y ago
      Why do they call it cold war, what do you think? They had wars either through proxy or through propaganda (aka. "culture"). Movies, music and books were big part of that war. Billions and billions went into the production and placement of them. If that doesn't show intent, then I don't know what would :) Don't get me wrong, I am actually impressed by it and gotta hand it to Reagan - winning a war without even firing a single shot. Edit: I don't want to downplay the factor of oil and, but I feel like it's off topic here so that's why I don't mention it.
Creationer 7y ago
For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English. But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well. Universities degrees are already offered in English, and at the very least fluency in the language is required to study most courses, since all of the articles, case studies and reference materials are in that language. It is time that that same flexibility was extended to the earlier years of education.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? I've seen children do this repeatedly and without any issue whatsoever, it is the adults that struggle.
- barking 7y ago
  Sounds like a dystopian future to me.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    A dystopia where every human can speak to any other? Imagine it was the other way around. There is a single language humans speak and someone suggests we should instead split in hundreds of non mutually intelligible ones. Why would any one want that?
    - barking 7y ago
      Because it's more interesting I think. Like I find europe more interesting than USA because the cultures are more varied and a big reason for that is the language variation. Sadly we are becoming more homogenised already. Dialects are disappearing and it's becoming possible to speak English everwhere as well as to dine in MacDonalds.
- geekpowa 7y ago
kowdermeister 7y ago
> The language of our time is English. And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.
- mxcrossb 7y ago
  If you really want to troll, try recommending Arabic as the language of Europe’s future ;)
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    I don't think it is a troll at all. The Chinese are ascendant and Europe / The West is clearly shooting itself in the foot at every chance we get. Given another 100 years the GGPs vision might come true. Of course that's a long time and all kinds of change could happen but it isn't out of the realm of the possible, and far more likely than many other candidates. The big change point to me would be if leading scientific publications would start to be in Chinese rather than English and the Chinese language would give access to unique knowledge. To some extent this is already true but it is not debilitating yet. Once that happens though studying Chinese to keep up with scientific development would be about as important as studying English is for scientists today. Maybe English already has a lock-in on this but I'm not sure.
  - faissaloo 7y ago
    Well if EU English becomes a thing what'll probably happen is a mix of North African Arabic dialects and EU English, my family and I speak a mix of Algerian, British English, American English and French French
- jonathanstrange 7y ago
  There are many reasons why Mandarin will not become the next lingua franca, most importantly the writing system which unifies China but is even hard for Chinese to learn. As it looks now, it seems more likely that more and more Chinese will become fluent in English and that some English - possibly including a lot of Chinese loannwords - will be the most widespread language in the 100 years from now. But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.
isolli 7y ago
English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.
- rusk 7y ago
  The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.
  - DanBC 7y ago
    A Scottish accent in Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA A Geordie accent on a British broadcast tv show (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o
    - isolli 7y ago
      It took me two years of working with a Scottish colleague to fully understand them.
  - Thimothy 7y ago
    "can be spoken poorly and still be understood" That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge. I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.
- giomasce 7y ago
  Yes, but it has the big disadvantage of a very irregular pronunciation. Other languages, like many southern European ones, seem to me to have much easier pronunciation. I am biased because I am Italian, but I am pretty sure that it is much easier for an Englishman with basically no Italian training to speak relatively correctly an Italian sentence than it is for me, after many years of studying and practising English, to properly pronounce English. I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it. I know I like to dream, but maybe...
tannhaeuser 7y ago
English is only the smallest common denominator really, and it hurts to hear Germans speak English imprecisely, stereotypically, or plain incorrectly. I'm far from being a language nationalist or something, but I think the EU (parliament, comission) should take the opportunity to move away from English, and begin to speak and publish in the "Common Tongue" (German, French, etc.) instead.
- flohofwoe 7y ago
  The current "common tongue" of the world and the EU is English. It might be a hardly recognizable pidgin dialect and very different from the posh Upper Class English spoken in London, but there's nothing wrong with that.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- anoncake 7y ago
  But is hearing Frenchpeople speak German really much of an improvement? At least everyone's English is about equally broken.
  - tannhaeuser 7y ago
    There's just too much nuance lost. French has very particular words for concepts of state philosophy, politics, and law, and so has German (eg. yesterday's result saw the Green party's uprising, with their somewhat gender-mainstreamed and weaseled, but in any case special language), and other European languages as well I guess. English could be easily seen as the language of eg. finance-dominated Eurocracy, so using plain language also helps in not portraying EU institutions as "slaves to an international capitalist elite" or something, and give arguments to radical parties.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      That's exactly why English is such a success. By losing nuance in the words but making up for it in the sentences the language becomes a lot easier to learn. I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing field.
s_dev 7y ago
It's vital small languages are preserved and that the world doesn't become monolingual. Communication is a funny word -- we often mean it to commuincate with others but often we communicate with ourselves in the present -- and to our furture selves -- e.g. code comments are often for your future self as well as other programmers. People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thought is absolutely essential to humanity progressing. It's been positied that "Asians are better at math" because their languages have a more logical naming system for numbers giving many a small early advantage that accumulates over time. Other languges possess other attributes that impart such advantages or disadvanges giving us diversity of thought so that we can have new ideas about things and new perspectives.
- etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
  That's a fine opinion to have but I happen to have the opposite opinion. A thought has the same meaning in any language. And we actually waste energy in translation and slow humanities' progress with language barriers. I really do wish we all spoke the same language. I feel like I gain nothing by not being able to communicate effectively with some subset of people. This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine...
  - s_dev 7y ago
    >I really do wish we all spoke the same language. Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier. It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.
    - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
      I'll bite. Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language. Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it. It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.
born2discover 7y ago
While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English. "We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers. [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/ http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/
  - born2discover 7y ago
    Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!
- mdhen 7y ago
  Due to not having an alphabet and being tonal I highly doubt Mandarin is ever going to be the lingua Franca. It's just too hard for non native speakers to learn.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That's a drawback when you're catching up but an advantage when you are ahead!
usrusr 7y ago
> The language of our time is English. I take that as a powerful argument against granting it any official preference: English is doing fine with or without being forced upon anybody. That would just provoke organized resistance.

by rofo1 7y ago

NotPaidToPost 7y ago

> We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress? It's extremely offensive to suggest that English is progress and other languages are a 'regression'.

Majestic121 7y ago
I think the progress part is about having a common language, not about this common language being English. If the common language was wolof, people moving back to their own (Spanish, French, German, whatever) would be regression, as now a discussion between French, Spanish and German people would be much much harder to have.
- NotPaidToPost 7y ago
  Well, the wording is rather clear that it was about English. Note that the author stealthily added a precision to his comment (which originally ended at "why regress?") since then to make clear it was about having a common language. But he has not removed the offending part.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    Adopting another language as our lingua franca when English is already filling that role would be a regression. It's not saying other languages are inferior per se, they might be superior. But using any other would be an inferior choice now. It doesn't mean we can't add local flavors to it. I am a French native speaker and I also think we should just use English and move on as a species. Interpersonnal communication is hard enough that we don't need artificial complications. Let's tackle more interesting problems. Same reason we should use a single measurement units system, mains current standard, a single currency, etc.
    - NotPaidToPost 7y ago
      'move on as a species'? How arrogant and offensive is that? Basically a cultural genocide. A language carries with it a whole culture and history. Diversity enriches everyone.

louthy 7y ago

> You can argue that it's because US won the cold war, and then indoctrinated the world Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause.

bhaak 7y ago
> Seems odd, surely you could argue it was because of British imperialism (which also brought English to the US)? The British empire once covered 1/3 of the globe, it seems far more likely a cause. If this were the reason, then English should already have been the lingua franca in 1900. But it wasn't. But the previous spreading of the English language by the English Empire certainly helped when the US emerged as one of the main beneficiary of WW2.
rofo1 7y ago
British empire was (almost) 1/4 - it was never close to 1/3 of the world. Even at its peak, English language wasn't as widespread as now. The French language was, especially in 18th and 19th century, having substituted Latin. After WW2, US absolutely dominated the world coming off as the only victor in WW2 (that's my personal opinion) and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world (over time), undisputed. The end of the cold war cemented this even further. We can argue that British imperialism helped somewhat, that I agree with.
- rocqua 7y ago
  > and used their position to place English language as #1 language of the world I doubt it was intentional. Seems like it was a nice side-effect at most.
  - rofo1 7y ago
    Why do they call it cold war, what do you think? They had wars either through proxy or through propaganda (aka. "culture"). Movies, music and books were big part of that war. Billions and billions went into the production and placement of them. If that doesn't show intent, then I don't know what would :) Don't get me wrong, I am actually impressed by it and gotta hand it to Reagan - winning a war without even firing a single shot. Edit: I don't want to downplay the factor of oil and, but I feel like it's off topic here so that's why I don't mention it.

Creationer 7y ago

For adults it is easy to move across the EU: you can work and socialise using in English. But for children, and families, it is impossible. How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? This seems like a huge disconnect. National governments need to start to offer (for parents that opt-in) primary and secondary education in English, with the entire curriculum and exams in that language as well. Universities degrees are already offered in English, and at the very least fluency in the language is required to study most courses, since all of the articles, case studies and reference materials are in that language. It is time that that same flexibility was extended to the earlier years of education.

jacquesm 7y ago
> How can a child move and be expected to learn a new language immediately? I've seen children do this repeatedly and without any issue whatsoever, it is the adults that struggle.
barking 7y ago
Sounds like a dystopian future to me.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  A dystopia where every human can speak to any other? Imagine it was the other way around. There is a single language humans speak and someone suggests we should instead split in hundreds of non mutually intelligible ones. Why would any one want that?
  - barking 7y ago
    Because it's more interesting I think. Like I find europe more interesting than USA because the cultures are more varied and a big reason for that is the language variation. Sadly we are becoming more homogenised already. Dialects are disappearing and it's becoming possible to speak English everwhere as well as to dine in MacDonalds.
geekpowa 7y ago

kowdermeister 7y ago

> The language of our time is English. And tomorrows language is mandarin. Let's not write off that 1.1B speakers. With the rate China is expanding its influence in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if in 100 years not speaking mandarin wouldn't look a bit odd.

mxcrossb 7y ago
If you really want to troll, try recommending Arabic as the language of Europe’s future ;)
- jacquesm 7y ago
  I don't think it is a troll at all. The Chinese are ascendant and Europe / The West is clearly shooting itself in the foot at every chance we get. Given another 100 years the GGPs vision might come true. Of course that's a long time and all kinds of change could happen but it isn't out of the realm of the possible, and far more likely than many other candidates. The big change point to me would be if leading scientific publications would start to be in Chinese rather than English and the Chinese language would give access to unique knowledge. To some extent this is already true but it is not debilitating yet. Once that happens though studying Chinese to keep up with scientific development would be about as important as studying English is for scientists today. Maybe English already has a lock-in on this but I'm not sure.
- faissaloo 7y ago
  Well if EU English becomes a thing what'll probably happen is a mix of North African Arabic dialects and EU English, my family and I speak a mix of Algerian, British English, American English and French French
jonathanstrange 7y ago
There are many reasons why Mandarin will not become the next lingua franca, most importantly the writing system which unifies China but is even hard for Chinese to learn. As it looks now, it seems more likely that more and more Chinese will become fluent in English and that some English - possibly including a lot of Chinese loannwords - will be the most widespread language in the 100 years from now. But I think you were downvoted for the wrong reasons, since otherwise the argument is fairly sound. Chinese influence is continually increasing world-wide. It's mainly the writing system that prevents a wider spreading of Mandarin, and the Chinese cannot give it up because it unifies their nation. Another possible scenario is that other languages of China die out even more quickly than they already do now, thus paving the way to full mutual comprehensibility via Mandarin, which would then allow a drastic reform of the writing system. However, this seems unlikely to occur within the next 100 years.

isolli 7y ago

English has the advantage of being an easy language to learn (at least up to 80% proficiency): no genders, little conjugation, no declension.

rusk 7y ago
The fact that it has so lany dialects that are frequently explored in popular media too means its a language that can be spoken poorly and still be understood. The listener bears some of the cognitive load and many other languages arent as advanced in this regard.
- DanBC 7y ago
  A Scottish accent in Parliament: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4k8dR04TzA A Geordie accent on a British broadcast tv show (Auf Wiedersehen Pet) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZY4TT3VtR8o
  - isolli 7y ago
    It took me two years of working with a Scottish colleague to fully understand them.
- Thimothy 7y ago
  "can be spoken poorly and still be understood" That is only something that is easy for native speakers, though. The points a non-native speaker anchors in the speaking flow are completely different to the ones a native speaker does, and depend on the mother language, making the thousand "official" variations of native English quite a challenge. I find far superior other languages approach of having a "high" form taught in schools that everybody native is supposed the speak and understand, and the dialects are left for home.
giomasce 7y ago
Yes, but it has the big disadvantage of a very irregular pronunciation. Other languages, like many southern European ones, seem to me to have much easier pronunciation. I am biased because I am Italian, but I am pretty sure that it is much easier for an Englishman with basically no Italian training to speak relatively correctly an Italian sentence than it is for me, after many years of studying and practising English, to properly pronounce English. I would like this EU English to evolve in the direction of keeping a simple grammar and going towards a more regular pronunciation. Basically it would become a new form of Esperanto, except that differently from Esperanto it would actually have a viable path for many people to learn it. I know I like to dream, but maybe...

tannhaeuser 7y ago

English is only the smallest common denominator really, and it hurts to hear Germans speak English imprecisely, stereotypically, or plain incorrectly. I'm far from being a language nationalist or something, but I think the EU (parliament, comission) should take the opportunity to move away from English, and begin to speak and publish in the "Common Tongue" (German, French, etc.) instead.

flohofwoe 7y ago
The current "common tongue" of the world and the EU is English. It might be a hardly recognizable pidgin dialect and very different from the posh Upper Class English spoken in London, but there's nothing wrong with that.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
anoncake 7y ago
But is hearing Frenchpeople speak German really much of an improvement? At least everyone's English is about equally broken.
- tannhaeuser 7y ago
  There's just too much nuance lost. French has very particular words for concepts of state philosophy, politics, and law, and so has German (eg. yesterday's result saw the Green party's uprising, with their somewhat gender-mainstreamed and weaseled, but in any case special language), and other European languages as well I guess. English could be easily seen as the language of eg. finance-dominated Eurocracy, so using plain language also helps in not portraying EU institutions as "slaves to an international capitalist elite" or something, and give arguments to radical parties.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    That's exactly why English is such a success. By losing nuance in the words but making up for it in the sentences the language becomes a lot easier to learn. I'd much rather have the common language of the EU be English even without an English representation in the EU than to have to parse EU legal documents in French or German. The occasional contract is bad enough. At least with English there is a level playing field.

s_dev 7y ago

It's vital small languages are preserved and that the world doesn't become monolingual. Communication is a funny word -- we often mean it to commuincate with others but often we communicate with ourselves in the present -- and to our furture selves -- e.g. code comments are often for your future self as well as other programmers. People who speak different lanaguges litteraly "think differently" and diversity of thought is absolutely essential to humanity progressing. It's been positied that "Asians are better at math" because their languages have a more logical naming system for numbers giving many a small early advantage that accumulates over time. Other languges possess other attributes that impart such advantages or disadvanges giving us diversity of thought so that we can have new ideas about things and new perspectives.

etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
That's a fine opinion to have but I happen to have the opposite opinion. A thought has the same meaning in any language. And we actually waste energy in translation and slow humanities' progress with language barriers. I really do wish we all spoke the same language. I feel like I gain nothing by not being able to communicate effectively with some subset of people. This is obviously not a very popular opinion of mine...
- s_dev 7y ago
  >I really do wish we all spoke the same language. Just contemplate how if someone suggested all computer languges should be just become C because things would be easier. It's even more important that we have diversity for natual languages imo -- after all onece you've a Turing Complete language one is the same as the next but we know how silly and inconvenient that would really be.
  - etaioinshrdlu 7y ago
    I'll bite. Computer languages are more about building a machine than communicating a human idea. Human languages are more about human things. We're all human and therefore should speak the same language. Computer languages are sometimes so similar and help you build a similar type of machine. Think of ruby, JS, python, etc. All work very similar internally. I really wish we could pick one language (in a particular domain, say scripting) and have a monoculture. It saddens me when libraries need to be rewritten N times. I don't think there's anything silly about it. Web browsers could have picked python instead of JS, Rails could have picked python, and we would have been better off for it. It's just a silly accident of history that we have what we have today.

born2discover 7y ago

While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English. "We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.

yorwba 7y ago
> almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers. [1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/ http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/
- born2discover 7y ago
  Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!
mdhen 7y ago
Due to not having an alphabet and being tonal I highly doubt Mandarin is ever going to be the lingua Franca. It's just too hard for non native speakers to learn.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  That's a drawback when you're catching up but an advantage when you are ahead!

usrusr 7y ago

> The language of our time is English. I take that as a powerful argument against granting it any official preference: English is doing fine with or without being forced upon anybody. That would just provoke organized resistance.