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I'm from Belgium. In the past, you needed to speak French in Belgium, even if the majority is Dutch-speaking. The people with money or power spoke French, if

I'm from Belgium. In the past, you needed to speak French in Belgium, even if the majority is Dutch-speaking. The people with money or power spoke French, if you wanted to have a voice, you spoke French. So people gave their companies French names, spoke French, read French newspapers,... Now,because of a variety of reasons, French lost a lot of its power. And in Flanders, younger generations and companies mostly stopped using French as second language. Now, starting at world war 2, English received the status of international default language because of economic and political reasons. Hollywood and the internet amplified it. It is hard in younger western generations to find someone not speaking English. Even local bakeries choose an English name. Doesn't make much sense, but thats what you do today. We're seeing now the economic and political rise of China, combined with a loss of power from the USA. It makes sense that the international default language will shift again. Arguments like 'too hard', 'complucated', 'inefficient', 'people already made the choice'? These wont matter. We've seen these in the past. Reality is simple: You adapt to the current power or you get marginalized. The only relevant question is wether China can reach the status of most powerful country or not. This is also the kind of advancement that happens a funeral at the time. We mostly wont spend the effort to change our second language. But the next generation?

bobbyz 6y ago
Generally agree, but efficiency does matter. Higher information density tends to mean faster reading and writing, slower speech, ability to memorize more information, less bandwidth consumption. Language efficiency gains are part of human evolution.
wenc 6y ago
English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of finance. English is a prestige language is many parts of the world not only due to its incumbency, but because new pop culture is being created in it every day. People learn languages for all kinds of practical reasons, but ultimately for a language to really take off, it has to endow personal prestige in some way and provide a window into a culture that is interesting or aspirational. People learn French and Italian due to the aspirational qualities of those languages. In contrast, relatively few people are learning Indonesian (outside of Indonesia) even though Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world (yes!) by population, potentially a huge emerging market, plus Indonesian is a super simple language. It seems to me the Chinese language does not currently have much currency in the soft power domain, partly because soft power requires the export of desirable cultural goods, which in turn requires a society that endows the creators of cultural products with freedom of expression. This freedom currently exists in Taiwan but Taiwan struggles with scale. This used to exist in HK, but the HK cultural industry has been on a decline since 1997 (and HK exports its cultural products in Cantonese). Japanese is arguably a harder language than Chinese, yet the Internet is full of foreigners trying to learn it because they're into anime etc.

bobbyz 6y ago

Generally agree, but efficiency does matter. Higher information density tends to mean faster reading and writing, slower speech, ability to memorize more information, less bandwidth consumption. Language efficiency gains are part of human evolution.

wenc 6y ago

English has another advantage: it's the language of "cool", i.e. a kind of soft power. It's the language of hip-hop, of Hollywood, of tech and of finance. English is a prestige language is many parts of the world not only due to its incumbency, but because new pop culture is being created in it every day. People learn languages for all kinds of practical reasons, but ultimately for a language to really take off, it has to endow personal prestige in some way and provide a window into a culture that is interesting or aspirational. People learn French and Italian due to the aspirational qualities of those languages. In contrast, relatively few people are learning Indonesian (outside of Indonesia) even though Indonesia is the 4th largest country in the world (yes!) by population, potentially a huge emerging market, plus Indonesian is a super simple language. It seems to me the Chinese language does not currently have much currency in the soft power domain, partly because soft power requires the export of desirable cultural goods, which in turn requires a society that endows the creators of cultural products with freedom of expression. This freedom currently exists in Taiwan but Taiwan struggles with scale. This used to exist in HK, but the HK cultural industry has been on a decline since 1997 (and HK exports its cultural products in Cantonese). Japanese is arguably a harder language than Chinese, yet the Internet is full of foreigners trying to learn it because they're into anime etc.