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The most spoken language in 2050 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 65 of 115 15 January 2015 at 8:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Having lived in both Manchester and San Francisco, I have seen, heard, and met
personally many native Hispanophones, but I am not sure of the status of Spanish and its linguistic potential in either city. Manchester have increasing numbers of immigrants from Spain, I am guessing due to the rather haphazard economic situation in which Spain finds itself, and the UK are part of the Schengen free movement. In San Francisco, I go to buy Mexican food about 3 or 4 times a week just a few blocks away from home, and I can easily just speak Spanish since they seem to feel more comfortable with anyone speaking Spanish than English, does not matter at all whether you are native or not (I am not). But I do notice one thing that is very important about Spanish and Hispanophones from my expereinces, is that they really do not switch to English readily, or are generally not as comfortable as for example, Swedes, Norwegians, etc. You can mess up in Spanish really badly, they take their whole time to converse with you no matter how pained the conversation can become, I see this with some non natives trying out Spanish in the Mexican restaurants that I frequent. This gives me an impression of Spanish speakers having a rather unique identity in that they value their language so much that they refuse to give it up in place of English, especially in comparison with speakers of other languages. Speaking about Spanish being used officially, I was recently in Salinas, California, and I must say that close to half of the signage, on restaurants, job offers, directions, services, etc. were entirely in Spanish. I mean Spanish entirely, not Spanish with an English translation below, but just entirely in Spanish. I have a strong feeling that they use Spanish widely there, not only just at home, but in the office, blue-collar jobs, at the petrol station, at the McDonald's, Burger King, at the doctor's surgery, wherever. I know few languages that are so adamant to have this phenomenon, especially one with such a broad amount of speakers and a potential lingua franca. Edited by 1e4e6 on 15 January 2015 at 9:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 66 of 115 15 January 2015 at 2:23pm | IP Logged | ||
The Anglophone inhabitants of USA have been eager to establish English as a world language used by people all over the world, and now you can't turn to clock back. If a recognizable variant of English with local elements develops in Eastern Asia then that will be a legitimate way of speaking English in the future - maybe with millions of native or nearnative speakers. And you can't expect people who have some local version of English as their second native language to stop communicating in that version with you in the States just to be polite. If their variant becomes firmly entrenched and welldefined enough then you'll have to live with it. English is already a language with lots of local variants, including variants within your own country. The formulation "languages which never got more complex than the very basic stages" is plainly wrong. Some of the most complicated languages are spoken by small populations in the jungle in South America or New Guinea. And that's part of the problem for these languages. English has a relatively flat learning curve, and without that it wouldn't have got so widely used. I doubt that you can choose deliberately to make your variant(s) of English more complicated, but if you could, it would cost you and your compatriots both influence and money. Edited by Iversen on 15 January 2015 at 2:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7143 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 67 of 115 15 January 2015 at 4:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm fairly skeptical of the idea of either Chinese or English, much less some combination of the two, supplanting English internationally in the foreseeable future. A number of the relevant factors have been addressed in previous postings, so I won't repeat them.
But there does seem to be an inaccurate perception that underlies this prediction, i.e., that they have "rapidly growing populations". The fact is that fertility rates are already quite low and falling in terms of native speakers of both languages, and this factor will certainly have an impact in the years ahead. China's one-child policy has clearly been a factor there, and the recent reversal on this front seems to be having only minimal effect so far. There seems to be a trend toward very small family size throughout Northeast Asia (China, Japan, and Korea) that has come about with prosperity, largely independent of government policies. Demographic trends in most of Latin America also show the same trend, with some countries already below the replacement rate. Spain also has a very low fertility rate. So while there may be factors that would assist Chinese and Spanish in becoming more widely used internationally, I wouldn't count on increasing populations to figure among them. (It's true that Spanish-speaking immigrants to the US have high fertility rates, but it's worth noting in this regard that the rates in their home countries are lower, and that these immigrants seem to become largely Anglophone over a couple of generations.) 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 68 of 115 15 January 2015 at 9:54pm | IP Logged | ||
I disagree, many languages in New Guinea and the South American rainforest are not as complex as they are hyped up to be. Flat learning curve? Otherwise it wouldn't be used? I thought you were not the kind of person to believe that myth! That kind of stuff is the same sort of stuff as the idea that cracking knuckles leads to arthritis or the common cold is caused by standing out in cold weather and not the fact it lowers one's immune system and being indoors leads to...ah you all know what I mean. The ideas of English's supposed simplicity, the whole norman conquest creolization myth and not the viking invasions or koine effects, using it because it is the easiest in the world, no language on earth has less "grammar" than English, etc the kind of stuff passed around in European speaking countries like a highschool rumor, and poor English gets bullied. "Primitive, uncouth, poor, crappy" all hurled, and like most bullies, full of double standards, non-european languages never get the same treatment despite some being isolating. Probably because they don't know much about them. (See S_Allard's post on Asian languages and nationals) (Not that he is a bully, he's not.) On the contrary, most of the simplifications (not the loss of inflection, the bias towards inflection among Europeans is atrocious) of traditional Germanic features such as numerous modals, prefixes, V2., to be perfect, reflexives, etc. dropped off as a result of more intrusions over the years from outside, they were gone pretty much by the 19th century, when English was letting itself go. Back to the other languages, they have tiny tiny phonological inventories and very simple syllable structures. These languages are semantically complex with evidentiality and different ways of marking information, but it's almost always mechanically attached. There are hardly any variations or irregularity to the same degree as many North American, some Central American, or western languages, the derivation too is very transparent with almost no alternants. The most difficult of them are like French in complexity. The amount of morphemes tends to be small as well, they're just stacked on top of each other. Complex? Well, in a way they are, but they are practically isolating languages with minimal phonological complexity with just no spaces between the words. They look like pretty much like basic conlangs out of some thread on zompist. For comparison, Languages like Russian and Icelandic look like "kitchen sink" conlangs from there. Would you agree though Japanese is a good example of recovery? Some Korean friends told me that they believe Japanese was a dumbed down version of Korean that the natives of the japanese isles tried to learn but messed up, while not accurate at all, it may have a grain of truth to it since Old Japanese is vastly vastly simpler than modern. Many east asian languages are getting their act together too and developing features. It is possible, I believe it, that even tok pisin could in 5,000 years given the right attitude become indistinguishable in complexity from a non- creole given enough isolation to redevelop as was done in Japanese and numerous tonal Asian languages with complex verb morphology. This would provide some hope for English were natives self-aware of what they speak. But English will never see a window from now on, if only native speakers didn't imitate non-natives so strongly nor willingly simplified their speech every day. The only other options is diglossia that will shield native English since we can't handle our own language correctly just as it is. Maybe it deserves to fade away into globish considering how little native speakers care, it's already the "sick man" of the Germanic languages, its not an Indonesian but it will be. Edited by Stolan on 15 January 2015 at 10:59pm 1 person has 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 69 of 115 16 January 2015 at 3:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Países de América Latina por población
Most of the countries of Latin America, which as a group, has a massive total already, seem to have birth rates over 1,00 as a ratio, with >1,00 meaning a growing population, 1,00 = steady state, and <1,00 as declining. It places the average of Latin America as a whole as 617.431.000 people by population, excluding other Spanish speaking parts of tge wiorld like Spain and Guinea Equatorial. It shows, the average birth rate of Latin America is 1,14 with an average increase by year of 7.072.000 persons. I see no reason why this amount of people cannot make Spanish a formidable contestant to English someday, add in Spain as the Spanish contestant for Europe, although they have certain economic problems right now. But crises do not last forever. It should also be noted that Brasil, whilst a Lusophone country, lies within the Hispanophone economic zones and trade agreements, wherein Spanish as a trade, business, agricultural, and empresarial language is used, like in UNASUR, or the OEA. I have a feeling that since the meetings are usually conducted in Spanish, Brasil might start to prioritise Spanish even more, adding their massive population base to the Hispanophone total, if they are not already. Edited by 1e4e6 on 16 January 2015 at 4:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| 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 70 of 115 16 January 2015 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||
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@Stolan: I'm not sure about your arguments about the non-complexity of South American and New Guinean
languages. Those languages are quite numerous and diverse; many of them undoubtedly have certain complexities that others don't. What specifically, if anything, can be said about such a motley group of languages? Then you list a lot of features that English lost, and allegedly South American and New Guinean languages don't have, such as "numerous modals, prefixes, V2., to be perfect, reflexives, etc." But English has some things that are complex, such as its lexicon and phrasal verbs. Now, I'm not saying that all languages have the same complexity--they don't--but I would need to see some more clearly defined criteria and their distribution before accepting such claims about hundreds of non-closely-related languages that aren't established in academic linguistics. You also suggest that languages isolated from foreigners tend to accumulate complexity, while languages spoken by foreigners tend to lose it. This is an idea that is held by many in academic linguistics, so it's plausible and may be true. The evidence is not overwhelming though, look at Spanish and its neighbor Galician, one is global and the other isolated, but they are awfully similar in structure. And it's not clear where to fit in dialect continua, which form the history of many of the world's languages. But all that aside, supposing your claims are accurate, why do you attach positive value to language complexity? Do you believe that the "complex" languages are better for communication? Or that they lead to cultural works of greater value? Or that they are intrinsically a beautiful and valuable thing? 2 persons have 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 71 of 115 17 January 2015 at 12:37am | IP Logged | ||
Isolation does not necessarily mean more complexity, the speakers of a language can choose not to let themselves go. I did not claim languages with more complexity are better, but the disparagement English gets for not being a melting pot of everything thrown in like Russian seems unfair to me. Maybe not disparagement but patronization, the second anyone says "English is used because it is so easy lol" they have the wrong image. Or even in cases where it's suggest that its only partially responsible such as by S_Allard who probably though English had the least amount of morphology and therefore was the simplest language there is for a period in his life (not now), this is a belief held by many in European speaking countries though. This idea spreads like a cancer. Complexity is too much of a factor for the other side: The idea Mandarin is too complex due to the tones is a euroncentrist observation. There are 2 Asian isolating langspeakers for every 1 European language speaker. Tonality to them is not difficulty, Mandarin is not considered a difficult language at all by them, they would laugh at how we think it is unlearnable and monstrous. They outnumber us yet the west thinks of the average human finding English to be soooo easy since they have no clue about language typology of variation throughout the world. Edited by Stolan on 17 January 2015 at 12:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 72 of 115 17 January 2015 at 1:03am | IP Logged | ||
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Wait, what?
Did you just call out people for being ignorant of other languages? Congratulations, you have just realised that humanity is not perfect. Welcome to the real world. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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