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"Language of the Future" | ||
Tags: Lingua franca | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 47 13 August 2012 at 2:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In the 80s, the US assumed that the future belonged to the Japanese. They were buying
our landmarks, out-competing our industries, and exporting some first-class cultural materials. Well, Japan was at the height of an economic boom, which popped, leaving them with two decades of stagnation. Nobody thinks Japanese is going to become the new lingua franca at the moment. But the cultural pull of Japan is still enormously strong, and there's a zillion anime lovers working through Reading the Kanji. So I agree that cultural influence is a big factor, and is still a fantastic reason to learn Japanese. China, like Japan in 80s, is currently at the height of an enormous economic boom. There's a real-estate bubble, a newly-powerful middle class, and a political dissent is kept in check by 7+% annual economic growth. When the bubble pops, China will have the same real-estate problems as Spain or the US, with a side-order of political conflict. The consequences could be anything from a minor hiccup to a major headache. So here's my litmus test for Chinese. When the current bubble pops, and China suffers from some temporary setbacks: 1) How many ambitious European, South American and Indian business students will be learning Chinese to B2/C1 fluency? The day you see Germans and Brazilians conducting business negotiations in Mandarin, the days of English are numbered. 2) How many people will be learning Chinese because they're in love with the culture? Personally, I suspect that English will remain strong in countries that speak an Indo- European language, including Europe, the Americas and probably India. Chinese will certainly make major inroads in Japan and Korea, and almost certainly some of the surrounding Asian economies. I suppose that India might wind up speaking both, to some degree. The fate of English isn't really tied to the political or economic power of the US. It's tied to what Europe, the Americas and India decide to use as an international language. Collectively, that's over 2.8 billion people, relatively few of whom are currently cramming the hanzi. This could change, but I don't think it's a foregone conclusion. And none of this is to knock learning Chinese, which is already a very important language. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sfeinst Newbie United States Joined 4597 days ago 21 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 18 of 47 13 August 2012 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think English will remain for a while because of very important languages. No, not spoken ones. Computer ones. Almost all computer languages (and definitely all the popular ones) are English-based. Yes you can name variables anything so you can use your native language, but the commands in the language are all in English. Yes most people do not actual program their computers, but with computers being so important to the world, those in power will force their people to learn English just so they can produce programmers. This would change if programming itself changed so that brand new ways of coding are adopted. I just don't see that happening any time soon.
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| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4935 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 19 of 47 13 August 2012 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think Mandarin has no chance in gaining wider popularity as long as it does not use proper alphabet but has an archaic character system requiring extremely hard work to master. It seems to me that in Europe, America and India only language geeks or people who have strong connections to Chinese culture can learn Mandarin to C1 fluency. C1 is the minimum level to conduct serious business. I seriously doubt that learning Mandarin is easy even for Japanese and Korean learners who are familiar with the tone system. The greatest competition advantages of English are relative easiness and Internet. Most people can quickly learn some useful broken English, but the language is not really hard to master either. The era of Internet brings a huge amount of resources available to almost everyone on the globe, but resources are really intelligible only if there is a common language. Widespread Latin language was by-product of Roman empire. I think English will be very strong as long as Internet of current nature stays online. Besides of blackout there is one dangerous predator which could gobble up English dominance. It is called Babel Fish. Very effective instant translation systems could radically change the world of languages. Edited by petteri on 13 August 2012 at 4:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5222 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 20 of 47 13 August 2012 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Erm. Could I possibly disagree? I learned to programme a computer in the early days and at the bottom level it's all Maths. The chip really doesn't care who or what gives it instructions but it only understands 1's and 0's. Unless I missed a leap in Science somewhere. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sfeinst Newbie United States Joined 4597 days ago 21 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 21 of 47 13 August 2012 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You can most definitely disagree :) Yes, computers are really math but unless you program in assembler (very very few people do), you are coding in a higher level language and all of the well known ones are in English. You can of course create a new programming language using whatever language you want for commands (even a made up language), but with the amount of code out there and the new code being developed, I think it very unlikely to occur until the technique of coding is changed. What I mean by this is that instead of writing out commands to produce a program, the paradigm changes to write code differently (maybe by dragging and dropping objects or filling in blanks and having the computer actually write the code). There are some attempts at both of these, but neither is close enough to override the need for programming languages. And I don't see the underlying language change just because the top language in the world changes from English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6442 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 22 of 47 13 August 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Programming languages generally have a few handfuls of keywords, and plenty of people use them without speaking English. Libraries and frameworks tend to contain English names, but this is certainly not universal, and it requires no change to compilers and underlying systems to have functions have French or pinyin names; some programming languages also easily accommodate Unicode identifiers. That aside, new programming languages are constantly being invented, and occasionally popularized, and many which were once popular have fallen into obscurity. Legacy code in systems that contain identifiers from several human languages can certainly be inconvenient, but programming languages are nowhere near important enough to determine a worldwide lingua franca... and you would be surprised how much code that is not in English is out there.
It's taking people a long time to learn enough English too; it's not like the average Spaniard, Russian, or Chinese person speaks it well. A change could not take place overnight, but don't underestimate what can happen in a few decades. I don't expect Chinese to become the next lingua franca, but I think you underestimate the ability of people to learn it, and overestimate the ability of people to learn English. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 47 13 August 2012 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree that programming languages are completely irrelevant to the question of a global lingua franca. People write code in French and German all the time, despite a few dozen English keywords like 'for' and 'if'. But when I was doing hard-core immersion in French, I actually tried writing code in French, reading manuals in French, and browsing programming blogs in French. This turned out to be surprisingly hard, for a number of reasons: 1) Virtually no open source code is published in French, and what little I could find was usually uncommented PHP code. 2) Half the French-language programming manuals on Amazon.fr were years out of date, and had little notices saying, "Only 2 copies left; order soon." 3) French programming blogs are full of links to English-language sites. When a link points to a French-language site, then that site is often a 1-page French summary of English documentation. 4) French programming conferences like Ruby Lugdunum are often held in English. This allows them to get more famous speakers, and it apparently helps the German programmers who want to attend. So basically, if you want to be a French Ruby programmer, it would really help to have passive B2-level skills in English. Maybe Java or C# is different. But I think that I could replace "programming" with quite a few other "white color" professions, and the situation wouldn't change much.
Oh, I agree that people could learn Mandarin instead of English. And if their mother tongue is Arabic, Japanese or Swahili, they won't find one language significantly harder than the other. But people who speak Spanish or French or German or any other western European language have a huge advantage learning English. The grammar is more- or-less similar, there's a ton of cognate vocabulary, and the alphabet is familiar. Going in the other direction, I find French a lot easier than Egyptian, and it's not because Egyptian is dead. It's because Egyptian grammar is radically different from anything I've ever seen in a European language, because there's almost no cognate vocabulary, and because I'm learning a new writing system. And all these challenges would apply to Mandarin, too. None of this is intended to discourage people from learning Mandarin. I think it will be a highly useful language in the future, and I'm certainly not entitled to criticize anyone for whimsical language choices. :-) It's just that China is only one rising power, and that India and Europe and South America will probably find it easier to negotiate contracts in English (or Hindi, or German, or Spanish, or Portuguese) than in Mandarin. And India's population is projected to pass China's by 2050, and they're not as far along the road of economic development. Combine that with newfound pride in Hindi (and Indian English), and who knows what the future will bring? You might as well learn languages because you love them, or because they'll be useful to you right away. Long- term geopolitics are just too uncertain. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 24 of 47 13 August 2012 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I agree with a lot of what has been said previously, including the obstacle provided by the Chinese
characters. This is easily underestimated and often shrugged off, but here are some telltale signs: 1: It's very common for native speakers of Chinese languages who are born abroad to not be able to read and write, despite being fluent speakers. This is very uncommon in all other languages, as far as I know. 2: It's a well-known phenomenon that even those born and educated in China, who then study a few years abroad, have difficulties with reading when they get back and take a while to refresh their skills. 3: There are a lot of people who live in Hong Kong and speak Cantonese as a second language. Few of them can read and write it. All of these are signs that unless China becomes a cltural giant (as it was in its area in ancient times), foreigners will not be likely to learn to read and write Mandarin (or any other "Chinese") because it really takes a lot of time to learn and maintain. I dln't believe the "easiness" of English is very obvious nor very important, compared to any other language, but the complexity of the Chinese writing system does make it stand out. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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