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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5058 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 25 of 115 06 January 2015 at 4:02am | IP Logged | |||||
Prestige, momentum, and dominance are closely connected. You could mean different things by "high culture," but take as an example the Nobel Prize in literature. It's been won by English-language writers nearly twice as many times as French-language writers, and five times as many as Italian-language writers. English-language TV shows and films are watched around the world. These aren't instances of a lingua franca being used for international communication; it's English-language culture asserting itself as the leader in both conservative high-culture institutions and the globalized popularity contest. On the other hand, there are some limited areas where Italian and French carry a lot of weight, probably more than English (classical music, fine dining). If by "prestige" you mean that the language carries a connotation of eliteness, then sure, French has that, partially by being disproportionately competitive in high culture. But English is the vehicle of most of the leading worldwide cultural forces today, which is what I meant with the ambiguous word "prestige."
My point wasn't that English is not easy; it was that there's not much evidence that ease-of-learning is a major factor in determining which languages rise to prominence. European languages aren't spoken in the Americas, Africa, South Asia, and Siberia because they were easy for the natives to learn. Instead, historical and geopolitical events were a much bigger factor. It's quite possible that the various languages would have attained their regional status (French in West Africa, Spanish and Portuguese in South America, English in South Asia and North America, etc.) even if their structure had been totally different. In fact, "difficult" Arabic has done so in the Middle East. That said, is there really a solid argument that English is easy? It's made to seem easier by the largish number of speakers of other European languages, the global reach of French and Latin loanwords, the economic incentives currently motivating English learners, and the abundance of English-learning resources. All those aside, is English still an easy language from a structural perspective? I would contest your feature #7; English has a larger phoneme inventory than average, especially an unusual vowel system. It's not, globally speaking, an easy language to pronounce. English also has some features that make it harder than most-- such as its layered vocabulary with no obvious relation between "see" and "visual," "taste" and "gustatory," etc. I imagine a good number of languages --not all-- could come up with a list of features that made them seem easy, and avoid mentioning the tricky ones. Furthermore, Mandarin has all of those features except it has tones and a hellish writing system. If it became the international language, it would probably transition to phonetic writing, and people would learn to understand speakers who mangle tones. But it doesn't have to be Mandarin. I'm sure it won't happen in the next 50 years, and fairly confident it won't in the next 100. But in the next couple centuries after that I'm not so sure any more. And I believe there are misconceptions and open questions as to which are the hindering factors that really matter, and which will simply crumble away if someday another language challenges Global English before it reaches the point where it's spoken fluently by all humans. Edited by robarb on 06 January 2015 at 4:04am 11 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 26 of 115 06 January 2015 at 5:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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As I said, I agree generally with the thrust of robarb's analysis of the situation. I still stand by my
suggested nuance of the use of the word prestige where I think lingua franca or prominence would be more accurate. Prestige and popularity are not synonymous. As for the number of Nobel prizes for literature, it should be pointed out that France has the highest number of winners for a country and that, relative to numbers of native speakers, French is the language with the largest number of Nobel laureates for literature. But, at the end of the day, the point of fact is that English is numerically dominant, whatever the reason. Similarly, I did not say that English is easy. I said that, when compared to the major languages, English has a number of features that make it relatively easy to learn. If I may quote myself: 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. Mandarin Chinese shares many of these easy features of English. Now if it only got rid of the writing system and the tone system, it would be a world-class contender. Something similar could be said of many languages. For example, if Spanish, which has a pretty phonetic writing system, a huge population base and a large international reach, were to get rid of grammatical gender and verb inflections, then it would be a serious contender. What the future holds hundreds of years from now we don't know. What we do know is that for the foreseeable future English will be numerically dominant. Edited by s_allard on 06 January 2015 at 7:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4031 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 27 of 115 09 January 2015 at 3:50am | IP Logged | |||||
FRENCH IS THE MOST PRESTIGUOUS IN THE WORLD? The world is filled with numerous countries that just stare at the linguistic elitism of European speaking ones and just go "eh". The other 7/8ths that don't matter. And you claims on English: Other major languages? It is a shame such a language family came to be so well known, the rest of the world tends to not be so poorly designed anyway. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Simple pronunciation? The usage of marked phonemes and vowel variation is much higher than in French! No diacritics? Have you ever heard of a well um... digraph? The vowels are vastly inaccurate but most non-native speakers don't notice that since they don't bother to differentiate many of them. OH no grammatical gender, yes every language except English has gender. English is so unique! And Spanish is so much more complex than English since conjugation and agreement are all that there is to grammar, part of the "sophisticated" language group. It's not like phrasal verbs, non-finite constructions, more marked phonemes and allophones means anything, no. Tone system of Chinese? Mandarin has 4 PUNY tones, it has a tiny vowel inventory, no consonant clusters, hardly any morphophonemic processes, codas can only be nasals, a very straightforward sentence prosody, and such but 4 puny tones make up for those? When will people just stop treating tones as exceptional, they are not, they are just like nasalization, vowel length, labialization, aspiration, creaky voice, and more, I never see anybody whining about those, but tones? Oh no. If Spanish were to get rid of verb inflections? Do you know what a principal part is? A language could have 500 verb forms yet each one is predictable from the present and past! English has 3 principal parts per verb. It seems we have so many people out there who feel the need to recite every single form of every new verb they learn instead of using the recognizable patterns, but critical thinking is lost to many of you. Oh, French, a supposedly "difficult" language. It is more conservative grammatically but it is not the inflections that I judge with but the overall structure of a language. Spanish, English, and Mandarin are one tier in my opinion without writing systems, and then there is Dutch, Portuguese, and Cantonese, then we have Romanian, German, and maybe Min/Hakka/Shanghainese. As for stuff like Icelandic/Russian/Latin, except for some parts of the caucus mountains unfortunate enough to be conquered by the Russians whereby some of the native languages were knocked out of their natural order that has existed for millennia. If anyone doubted me on what I have said before, then look here, we have a shining example of the kind of points and beliefs made I keep on talking about. S_Allard, do you have any clue about linguistic typology and evolution? The thousands of languages and varying language families? Well I guess standard average European is nice and cozy enough to apply to everything. Measuring complexity requires all sorts of criteria, and complexity itself is a broad term, for example, Russian is not really more semantically or overall more detailed than many languages, it is just so unusually irregular and inconsistent that it gains some sort of praise as being "complex". The Chinese writing system is the orthographical equivalent of how many conservative European languages and some nearby (as Japanese took and madee Kanji, Chechen/Ingush took and made chaos) are in their grammar. People admit the Chinese system is unique, it is ridiculous to try and justify it as being as similar to other writing systems in the world using phonetic techniques more often. A feel can be gotten but it is all down to memorization with the hints being nothing more than quick reminders. Why am I mentioning this? Because people like S_Allard take their idea of what grammatical difficulty is normally like in "major languages" (which are not), and see English as exceptionally easy. Comparing a 5 "10" man to a person with a hormone problem making them 7 "9" would cause many to call the 5 "10" man short if all they knew were tall people on some bizarre island. Everybody is honest about the Chinese writing systems, but not elsewhere. Edited by Stolan on 09 January 2015 at 4:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 115 09 January 2015 at 6:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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What is the fuss about? I simply said that I thought that of the major contenders for lingua franca
status English has number of structural features that make it relatively easier to learn than the other contenders. The key word here is "relatively easy". OK maybe I was wrong. I don't object to the argument that all languages are equally complex. So English doesn't have diacritics but it has digraphs. It doesn't have tones but it has a vast vowel system. It would seem that English pronunciation is more difficult that French pronunciation. It doesn't have grammatical gender but it is not unique; there are many languages without gender. English has very simple verb inflections but a very complex phrasal verb system. It's writing system is notoriously complex. It now seems that English is one of the most difficult languages around. So I'll concede that my argument of the ease of learning of English was wrong. I'll even admit that Mandarin, Russian, French, Spanish, Hindi, English, etc. are just as difficult or easy to learn for everybody. As for French being a language of prestige and high culture, I take that back as well. Actually, it was robarb who argued that English had become a prestige language. I simply argued that prestige and prominence were different concepts. But if that creates a problem, we can say that French has no prestige at all. That said, this evening I was looking at a picture of a huge crowd in the Place de la Bastille in Paris protesting the killing of 12 people in the offices of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo. People were holding up a huge sign NOT AFRAID. I don't know if anybody else has noticed that in many demonstrations all over the world today many signs are in English. Not all in English of course. I imagine that it probably is for global media coverage. The point here is that English, with all its warts and difficulties that make it very difficult, is the de facto lingua franca of today and the foreseeable future. Edited by s_allard on 09 January 2015 at 6:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 29 of 115 09 January 2015 at 7:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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English has momentum and it'll take a lot to stop it. All those people who have learned English as a second language have an incentive to keep it as the lingua franca. Latin remained the common language of Europe for a milennium after the demise of the Roman empire, and Chinese languages have remained lingua francas of the areas conquered by China even after twice being conquered by a people speaking an arguably easier language. I think he reverse is true, however: a widely spoken lingua franca will tend to be "worn smooth by many tongues". I don't think it's an accident that Mandarin and English have both lost features that are kept by closely related languages. The loss of the gender system in Afrikaans could be another example.
That said, the world is changing much, much more rapidly today than in the middle ages. So who knows what will happen? Edited by Ari on 09 January 2015 at 8:05am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Juаn Senior Member Colombia Joined 5344 days ago 727 posts - 1830 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 30 of 115 09 January 2015 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
That is the answer, truly. No one knows. Furthermore, no one can know. History is not a progression or sequence that can be solved in advance but the emergence of new realities. In the case of Spanish, Latin America is experiencing its darkest hour. Most countries are ruled by socialist authoritarian regimes of varying degrees of corruption and oppressiveness. There is social breakdown, spiraling violence, and dim economic prospects. A liberal hold on the minds of the elites and the institutions of society prevents fresh conceptions and relevant solutions to be formulated. We keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and complain about the recurrent outcome. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4289 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 31 of 115 09 January 2015 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Its darkest hour? This is the shining time for Latin America. The USA have lost its
dominance to control Latin America and Russia and China have proved better trading partners, with one having the massive language of Mandarin, and Spanish as a clear candidate for a lingua franca. "Socialist authoritarian regimes?" People actually vote for CFK, Bachelet, Mujica, Rousseff, Correa, Maduro, Ortega, etc.? Perhaps you forget what happened with Pinochet, Videla, Bordaberry, Bautista, and all of the fascists and ultra-capitalists that prevented Latin America from independisiing itself? Spanish as a lingua franca, or at least one of the linguæ francæ I predict is within 30 years, as Spanish speakers reject learning English, the language that caused them so much grief in the past (USA-backed dictatorships, Falklands/Malvinas War of 1982), etc. I watch Spanish television on daily basis, and on one travel programme on Stockholm, a Spanish presenter who knew very little Swedish and from what I can see, close to no English, did not want to speak more than one sentence of English during the entire programme, instead speaking Spanish to a Swede who responded in English with a scene- cut, I suppose that this presenter required a translator because his English was not good enough to communicate to Swedes in English. Instead when he ordered at restaurants, he resorted to Swedish (no English at all!) I saw the English levels of Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Perú, Ecudaor, and these countries are placing literally in the lower 10th percentile of all of the world in terms of learning English as a second language, in some cases 20% at the highest maximum, and these are very important, growing economies. The good thing is that they reject English, refuse to learn it obsessively to a high level, because they realise that English already has too much dominance and want to create a counterbalance to English in the form of Spanish. This is time for the Spanish language and Spanish speakers to shine. Like Mujica said, «En EEUU van a tener que comenzar a hablar español» I would not be surprised that Spanish and Mandarin advance together as both Spanish speaking countries and the PRC have more trade deals, the interchange between both regions increaes, then both can easily become linguæ francæ that start from their own regions first and expand later. Edited by 1e4e6 on 09 January 2015 at 9:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6581 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 32 of 115 09 January 2015 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't, but FYI, "lingua franca" is not Latin, so it doesn't make sense to paste a Latinate plural ending on it. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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