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Future outlook: French vs. Portuguese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes  Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 9 of 81 12 December 2011 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Not to mention that there are at least two fairly large and a handful of smaller African countries that have Portuguese as an official language. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fomalhaut Groupie United States Joined 4904 days ago 80 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 10 of 81 12 December 2011 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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The future is brighter where you want it to be; Brazil's growth means nothing to you as a learner if you have no interest in Portugese/Brazilian culture, the Domini de Lingua, and so forth.
vice versa for french a previous poster has said it far better, though 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 11 of 81 13 December 2011 at 3:00am | IP Logged | ||
You're completely missing the point. While we can't make a universal equation for the attractive power of a language, we can judge it in a general way. After all, who can't explain why Japanese attracts many times more learners than say, Polish? Judging which language will come out on top requires some rough estimating and guessing, but it is also an opportunity for people to provide new insights on the development of these languages. So to everyone who finds the development paths of languages interesting, and isn't averse to a little lighthearted linguistic competition between our friends French and Portuguese, carry on. And I believe a couple people have remarked that people just learn whatever language they are interested in and that's that. Yes, but if you look a layer beneath that platitude, you find complex interactions between politics, economics, and culture that produce that interest in peoples' minds. Think of for example all the political, economic, and cultural factors that combined to make French an exceedingly attractive language in the first place. And remember, we are speaking of general attractive power, not of a universal constant of linguistic attractive power. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| brumblebee Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6776 days ago 206 posts - 212 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese | Message 12 of 81 13 December 2011 at 5:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I see that you are a native American English speaker who has studied Spanish.
I have recently made this decision between French and Portuguese. I am a native speaker of English from the American South who has studied Spanish inside and outside of courses for seven years. My grandmother is a native speaker of Spanish, so I have spent hours perfectly my pronunciation (Mexican dialect). I originally decided to go with French because of its more cosmopolitan appeal, but then realized that pronunciation was going to be a real struggle for me. I then decided to switch to Portuguese because the language has longer vowels (whereas Spanish is more staccato and "sing-songy" according to my linguist friend). As someone who has taken graduate-level reading courses in Spanish, I am reading proficient in all three languages, but think studying Portuguese will help me prepare to tackle French pronunciation. I also have a significant interest in Latin American studies, so I may be more biased. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 13 of 81 13 December 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think they will stay approximately the same as they are now, that means more popularity for French.
The popularity and importance of French is and will be declining but it has been declining from a very strong position in the world. It will stay the language of attractive culture and it might stay an important language in Europe (unless it gets federalized with German as the official language which would be a very bad choice (the language) for various reasons in my opinion). And there is Africa where anything could happen and I don't have enough knowledge about it to dare to guess. French, Arabic, Swahili, Xhosa, another local language, anything is possible there. Portuguese will stay the language of Brasil and the country might become much more important in the world. But it will not get the strong position of French. There just won't be enough space for it because the most important will stay English and it will be followed by several languages including the asian ones and Spanish. Perhaps Portuguese might lower the popularity difference between itself and Spanish if the country got more important in the South America and more wealthy. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 81 13 December 2011 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||
I can tell. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| stout Senior Member Ireland Joined 5372 days ago 108 posts - 140 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 15 of 81 13 December 2011 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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That depends.For me French is more useful than Portugese because I live in Ireland which
is in Europe and French is spoken far more in Europe than Portugese.Plus French is spoken in Canada and many African countries too. French is a lot closer to English than Portugese.French is a more of an international language than Portugese.Like the English language French to a lesser extent is a lingua franca too.So my vote is for the French language. Edited by stout on 13 December 2011 at 7:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Camundonguinho Triglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4750 days ago 273 posts - 500 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, Spanish Studies: Swedish | Message 16 of 81 14 December 2011 at 5:19am | IP Logged | ||
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Portuguese language is already split:
1. in Brazil we can see movies, series from Portugal only after they are dubbed into Brazilian; all soap operas from Portugal were dubbed here in Brazil 2. Portuguese people translate modern Brazilian writers like Paulo Coelho because they find it disturbing to read the modern Brazilian Portuguese which they describe as ''full of errors'' Assim como o Português saiu do Latim, pela corrupção popular desta língua, o Brasileiro esta saindo do Português. O processo formador é o mesmo: corrupção da língua mãe. (Monteiro Lobato 1922) A separação estrutural entre a língua de Portugal e do Brasil é um fenômeno lento e de águas profundas, que é fácil, e, a muitos, desejável não observar. (Ivo Castro, Universidade de Lisboa 2001: 24). Even Africans hate our Brazilian Portuguese: Novelas brasileiras causam danos na língua portuguesa http://www.angonoticias.com/Artigos/item/7591 The British don't call the language used in American movies and series as ''incorrect'' English, but most Portuguese and Angolans accuse us of ''butchering the noble language of Camões''. Two languages have diverged immensely in the last 200 years, and only in the most formal register the ''unity'' is held, but that's because Brazilian Portuguese is diglossic, like Swiss German. We don't normally write as we speak. We speak according to the Brazilian grammar, not the official one imported from Lisbon. Just like people in Zurich speak in Swiss German although they write in German of Germany (Highdeusch). Most people in Brazil don't even want to know about this ''lusofonia''. It's just a new name for postcolonialism. Portugal is ignored in Brazil. No one can name one Portuguese singer. At the same time, the most popular foreign singer in Brazil is Laura Pausini. Industrial advance of Brazil is because of Italian immigrants, and this truth is celebrated in Brazil. If it hadn't been for Italians, Brazil of today would be like Guatemala or Honduras. In Spain, more people learn French than Portuguese. That's because Portuguese is a language of low prestige in Spain, like Romanian. In Argentina some people learn Portuguese, but not many of them. Edited by Camundonguinho on 14 December 2011 at 5:32am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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