|
 |
The most spoken language in 2050 | ||
Tags: Language Importance | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 17 of 115 04 January 2015 at 3:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Or well, the number might be somewhat higher but the percentage will be lower imo. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 115 04 January 2015 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
It seems to me that the distinction should be made between the languages with the most native speakers
and the language most widely spoken. Most of the discussion so far in this thread has really been more about the former category. In the latter category, English is way ahead of the pack. Is there another language gaining on English as a language of international reach? Think of the language of science, technology, international finance, military cooperation, aviation, international higher education, etc. I don't seeing any language coming close to replacing English in these areas. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 19 of 115 04 January 2015 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Dutch. The sea levels will suddenly rise, the Dutch will be the only nation with
sufficient civil engineering skills to survive, and they will slowly but surely conquer the earth, as they meant to do ages ago. All other nations suddenly have to dispatch half their medical staff to specialised courses for "tonsillitis". :D Edited by tarvos on 04 January 2015 at 7:45pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5337 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 20 of 115 05 January 2015 at 6:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I'm with s allard on this, and it is of course stating the obvious, but I see no way that any other language will
get the chance to be as dominant in arts, technology, computer science etc as English. At least not in my lifetime, which hopefully is until 2050. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| liam.pike1 Groupie Australia Joined 3757 days ago 84 posts - 122 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, French | Message 21 of 115 05 January 2015 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I don't care what language is the most dominant one in 2050, as long as it isn't Mandarin or Arabic.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5062 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 22 of 115 05 January 2015 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
The sentiment of Luke's statement is true, but rather than Russian it would be better to bring up big languages with growing demographics such as Portuguese, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, and maybe Indonesian.
35 years is such a short timescale. It seems super obvious that another global language will not replace English so quickly. However, given that English is the first language to become a prestige language on a truly global scale and in an age of instant worldwide communication, some have claimed that it has reached the point of no return, and will remain the language of international communication from now on . Common supporting arguments for this claim: 1. Switches of the prestige language usually involve a transfer of power to some outside group-- but unlike in the past, English is the prestige language everywhere. 2. The non-English language most likely to dominate in numbers and economic power in the near future, Mandarin, is considered inaccessible to foreigners and "too hard" to learn. 3. English is dominant in nearly every field, unlike in the past where Italian competed in music and German competed in chemistry, etc. 4. There is a lot of inertia; people don't want to switch. All of these reasons seem pretty strong to me except the argument from difficulty; historically the rise of languages to prestige doesn't seem to be strongly determined by how hard they are to learn. Given the motivation, anyone can learn enough to communicate; Chinese and Vietnamese are willing to communicate with each other in English even though it's terribly difficult for both of them. What would it take to unseat English? I can think of a few scenarios with various degrees of plausibility: - The idea of a constructed auxiliary language finally finds a zeitgeist where it works. It won't be Esperanto. Seems unlikely, but the culture of the future is hard to predict. - A non-English-speaking state reaches a level of dominance such that it can impose its language as the international one. I'm pretty sure that 21st-century China won't do this. But it doesn't seem impossible that a non-Anglophone country could establish hegemony someday, and if its language were more global than Mandarin currently is, it could replace English. - Global catastrophe could cause the institutions that global English dominates to collapse, plunging the world back into pre-20th century linguistic pluralism. - Technology could make the cost of cross-linguistic communication much lower, either by machine translation or by making it significantly easier to learn a foreign language. If by translation, it could eliminate the need for a global language, with everyone just using their native language and the technology bridging the gap. If by easing the learning process, it could reduce inertia to the degree that a cultural whim could be enough to trigger a switch in a future world where English no longer makes sense except by tradition. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 115 06 January 2015 at 2:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree generally with this post but I want to suggest a few nuances. First, I would suggest that English is not so much a prestige language as a lingua franca. If we use the word prestige in the sense of high culture, admiration, elitism and respect, French is probably the most prestigious language around. English is probably second or maybe third, after Italian. But English is certainly the totally dominant language of international communication. In this sense it is rather unique. Except for indigenous minority languages within English-speaking countries, few native languages are actually being displaced by English. As ubiquitous as English has become in the Scandinavian countries and in Holland, I don't get the impression that the local languages are threatened. However, English has become the de facto language of communication between speakers of all the other languages. This is not a matter of prestige but more one of gathering momentum. As has been pointed out, nothing comes remotely closely to slowing the spread of English. One only has to look at the numbers of people studying the various languages in the world. I don't have any figures on hand but I would think that there are more people studying English than the total of all people studying the other languages in the world. Compare the number of people in China studying English to the people studying Chinese Mandarin. Finally, I would suggest that ease of learning does play a role here. Although political and economic factors play an important role in the spread of a language, a number of features of English, especially when compared to the other major languages, help to make English a good candidate for world domination. Here are a couple: 1. No grammatical gender. 2. Hardly any noun declensions. 3. Simple logical word order. 4. Simple verb conjugations. The only complications are the past forms and past participles. 5. Simple number agreement morphology. 6. A simple writing system with no diacritics. 7. Pretty simple pronunciation despite a rather chaotic spelling system. Now compare this to any of the major languages out there. Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic all have major handicaps. I will certainly not be around for the next hundred years but I am convinced that English will still be the dominant medium of international communication during this time. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 24 of 115 06 January 2015 at 2:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
In an improbable turn of events, all of South America unites to form one enormous superstate and Portuñol
takes over the globe. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
