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> In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world
by azangru 5y ago
> In the unlikely event that US falls, I don't think anybody would switch to anything else when communicating cross culturally, because people across the world are more likely to know broken English than even a single word of Mandarin.
I hope you are right; but it's one of the observations of sociolinguistics that a more "prestigious" language eventually wins out, and until recently, prestige was synonymous with power. I hope that with the arrival of the internet we may be past that, and that English has reached sufficient critical mass to stay dominant even after the fall of the US; but if history is any guide, a new superpower may eventually replace it with its language. This happened to Greek, Latin, French and German; it could happen to English too.
- roywiggins 5y agoIf you remove American and UK influence, I expect the resulting English would rapidly mutate into its own thing, even more unlike US/UK English than the international dialect of English mentioned in OP.
- imbnwa 5y agoPrecisely what happened to Latin
- miki123211 5y agoI think English has embedded itself in the technology niche so deeply that it's not going away anytime soon. Everything in tech is English based, from programming languages to kernel boot messages. Even the way we think about text doesn't let itself well to Kanji, never mind RTL languages. While GUI operating systems can handle that, your average recovery command prompt cannot. Other languages might become dominant in new (or currently under explored) areas of science maybe in quantum computing, bioengineering and such, but computing is going to be tied to English for a long time.
- azangru 5y agoUnless I am mistaken, the language of science in late 19th – early 20th century was German. And then it suddenly wasn't.
- miki123211 5y agoIt's easy to start talking about something in a different language. It's possible to translate most of the relevant literature into that language. Changing the keywords in programming languages, HTTP headers, JSON field names, identifiers in library code, error messages embedded deep in boot ROMs and so on is much more difficult.
- aasasd 5y agoYou seem to think that one needs to learn the human language to learn those keywords. That's demonstrably false, as evidenced by hordes of programmers who can barely read English sentences, much less write anything coherent. They already cargo-cult the programming language words without understanding the human language, and the actual spoken/written languages bear no influence on that. If Spanish becomes the dominant language of the web, some of them will learn to read and write Spanish while continuing to cargo-cult English programming keywords into those conversations.