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"Language of the Future" | ||
Tags: Lingua franca | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4528 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 9 of 47 13 August 2012 at 4:21am | IP Logged | |||||
저도 생각해요! tr: I think so too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Coheed Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 4687 days ago 26 posts - 40 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Romanian, Irish | Message 10 of 47 13 August 2012 at 5:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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Whether or not English will be supplanted by another language is, in my opinion,
impossible to determine. We cannot speculate on the changes that will derive from the present time, precisely because it is the present time and we lack the historical perspective to situate it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 47 13 August 2012 at 7:58am | IP Logged | |||||
4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| onurdolar Diglot Groupie TurkeyRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4653 days ago 98 posts - 147 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 12 of 47 13 August 2012 at 9:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well power and influence of English does come from it's ability to export culture and that is thanks to Americans. When Britain was world's number one power during 19th century ( and perhaps 18th century ) lingua franca was French not English. Although Britain was more powerfull economicaly and politicaly French were the ones that exported culture. Of course i don't deny that ability of exporting culture is closely related to economic power still it doesn't mean Chinese will take over English even if China becomes nr1 economic power. They are still long way behind on cultural side.
In my opinion; English won't loose it's lingua franca status in near future at least not this century. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4869 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 13 of 47 13 August 2012 at 9:21am | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe the world will be divided into people who listen to pop and communicate in Korea and people who listen to rock and communicate in Finnish. What could those two groups possibly have to say to each other anyway? ;) (But in that case I'm studying the wrong language... hmm...) Edited by druckfehler on 13 August 2012 at 11:15am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 14 of 47 13 August 2012 at 11:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree: lingua francas are not based upon economic power rather than cultural power. Latin was dead yet used until
it was replaced by French. During classical times Greek was used in the Roman Empire by the elite – but Greece was then a Roman colony and they took many slaves therefrom (some made very good tutors in Greek!). Aramaic was used in the Persian Empire albeit the leaders of the same empire spoke Old Persian. Akkadian was the Lingua Franca during the period before the Bronze Age collapse used by Egyptians (far away and never threatened by Assyrians nor Babylonians) and Hittites who destroyed and pillages Babylon once. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 15 of 47 13 August 2012 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It won't happen overnight, but I think the status of English will gradually change.
More important to me is that it will continue to diverge, in the different places where it is used, primarily the spoken language, but eventually the written language as well. There is not one English in use around the world, but many. This is most obvious if you look at the English spoken somewhere like India, and it's almost certainly true in the former British possessions in Africa, for example. The English spoken by South African whites is not the same as that spoken in London (although it is mostly intelligible by Londoners), and by South African blacks even more so. Perhaps in a hundred years it will have evolved into a sort of English version of Afrikaans. On a lighter note, older members may recall the cold war joke about a machine that could foretell the future. I tried to find it via google, but failed, but it goes something like this: American scientists had invented a machine that could foretell the future, and they proudly wheeled it out in front of the US president to show him what it could do. He was very excited by this and told them to ask it what America would be like in 50 years. They typed in the appropriate programme and sat back and waited for the answer to be typed out. At last it churned out an answer which the chief scientist grabbed and quickly looked through before submitting it to the president. The president, getting impatient, barked out: "Well, what does it say?" The embarrassed scientist replied: "Um, I'm sorry Mr President, I don't know. The answer is in Chinese!". (The writing was on the wall even then :-) ). Edited by montmorency on 13 August 2012 at 1:33pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 16 of 47 13 August 2012 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the increasingly global nature of the English language community will prevent its dialects from fracturing into different languages. America and England export so much media to the rest of the world that our dialects are immediately understandable to the vast majority of English speakers everywhere, and are exerting a lot of influence on those dialects. Even if we may have occasional trouble understanding people from India or Jamaica or Singapore, we are having more and more interactions with people who speak those other dialects too.
There will always be dialectal differences, but in my opinion the utility of English as a lingua franca, and the increasing amounts of exposure we are all getting to other dialects, should be enough to keep the different forms of English mutually intelligible. Historically, dialects have only drifted apart into different languages when some significant geographical or social barrier kept communities of speakers from communicating on a regular basis. Now even the oceans can't keep us from communicating with each other, and cultural/political differences are becoming more and more irrelevant to people's desire to learn what is increasingly a world language detached from any specific country. Edited by Levi on 13 August 2012 at 2:33pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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