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Most influential languages

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52 messages over 7 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 
luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 49 of 52
15 April 2013 at 2:34am | IP Logged 
tarvos wrote:
What evidence is there to show that FSI's reasonings are accurate? Mandarin is a language spoken by a billion human beings on this planet. I wonder if Chinese kids learn to speak at age 7,5 because it's more difficult?


The FSI's evidence is based upon 50+ years of experience teaching foreign languages to native English speakers.
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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
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 Message 50 of 52
15 April 2013 at 1:49pm | IP Logged 
I think Casamata's internet statistics at page 4 are very revealing. Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese have a lot of native speakers, and they also have a lot of second language learners, but when it comes to global communication on the internet it is English versus all the rest ... with English as the clear winner. There is one caveat, namely the alternatives to the internet, where China through the sheer numerical bulk of Mandarin could establish an internal system with hundreds of millions of users who all communicated in Mandarin. But 'influence' is not measured internally, it is always influence over somebody else, and here English is by far the winner, both in terms of people who have chosen to learn it as a second language and people who after having learned it also have been invited/forced/lured to use it - like we do here at HTLAL.

Maybe China one day becomes so influental in Eastern Asia that its leaders choose to support a purely Mandarin alternative to the internet, and that the leaders in the whole region have to prioritize the mandarinification of their populations - but so far this hasn't happened.       

Edited by Iversen on 15 April 2013 at 1:53pm
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Carlucio
Triglot
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Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishC1, Spanish
Studies: Mandarin

 
 Message 51 of 52
15 April 2013 at 4:27pm | IP Logged 
Language influence changes from place to place, Portuguese has thousands of arabic words because the moors invaded and hold Iberia for centuries, but how many words does Italian has?

Right now Portuguese is being very influenced by English , Spanish constructions and specific vocabulary like the verb "Lograr" can be heard more frequently, French had huge influence for centuries and also lent thousands of words to Portuguese but it declined to almost no influence recently, Mandarin right now has zero influence in Portuguese but doubt it is not influencing it's neighbors languages.
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casamata
Senior Member
Joined 4267 days ago
237 posts - 377 votes 
Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 52 of 52
15 April 2013 at 6:40pm | IP Logged 
Iversen wrote:
I think Casamata's internet statistics at page 4 are very revealing. Mandarin, Spanish and Portuguese have a lot of native speakers, and they also have a lot of second language learners, but when it comes to global communication on the internet it is English versus all the rest ... with English as the clear winner. There is one caveat, namely the alternatives to the internet, where China through the sheer numerical bulk of Mandarin could establish an internal system with hundreds of millions of users who all communicated in Mandarin. But 'influence' is not measured internally, it is always influence over somebody else, and here English is by far the winner, both in terms of people who have chosen to learn it as a second language and people who after having learned it also have been invited/forced/lured to use it - like we do here at HTLAL.

Maybe China one day becomes so influental in Eastern Asia that its leaders choose to support a purely Mandarin alternative to the internet, and that the leaders in the whole region have to prioritize the mandarinification of their populations - but so far this hasn't happened.       


Another MAJOR point is that the languages with relatively low levels of internet content or internet users like French, Spanish, and Arabic will grow a lot in the future. Compared to countries with English as the official language, internet growth will be much more rapid since a large percentage of the population isn't connected yet. However, the percentage of web pages written in English will probably still be much higher than the percentage of users that speak English.

This is one reason why I think that English will not fragment into several languages like what happened to Latin--technology may help a standard English be maintained.

Really, this thread should be about the most influential languageS or the second most influential language. It is hard to argue that English is not or will not be the most influential language in the near future.


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