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2031: More and Less Influential Languages | ||
Tags: Lingua franca | Language Politics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| anothername Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 5062 days ago 96 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Spanish, English | Message 17 of 25 20 April 2011 at 3:56am | IP Logged | |||||
As a brazilian, I would be more realistic and change your sentence to "spoken in ONE important country with NO significant bounce beyond its borders". (sorry, portuguese people, I'm trully wishing you recover from the financial crisis, and you will) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6253 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 18 of 25 20 April 2011 at 4:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Best response so far! I think the famous linguist Nicholas Ostler summed it up best when he said that the two real factors that determine whether a language will be influential or not are: 1. The distribution of speakers. 2. Who those speakers are.
You would think so wouldn't you? I looked and looked and couldn't find one. I am surprised to read that there are those that think that everything will be linguistically the same in twenty years. There is this thing called globalization. There are going to be huge changes in twenty years. Just ask the Middle Easterners. I think that this also includes attitudes towards languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 19 of 25 20 April 2011 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As a former instructor in English as a Second Language, I am skeptical about how easy it is to learn English. Plenty of people around the world struggle with English.
I teach English at the university level to native speakers, and many of them struggle with sentence structure, the spelling of common words and punctuation. It is easy to learn a smattering of English and be able to communicate at a very basic level, but if you want to be fluent and handle English well, it's plenty of work. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| portunhol Triglot Senior Member United States thelinguistblogger.w Joined 6253 days ago 198 posts - 299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: German, Arabic (classical) | Message 20 of 25 22 April 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have been surprised that so many people doubt that Chinese will be more influential in twenty years that it is now. Here's some reading for the doubters:
Chinese in the USA Chinese in Europe Chinese in India Chinese in Africa Chinese in South America I'm not saying that Mandarin is going to replace English. I'm saying that more non-native speakers will know it in twenty years than do today. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 21 of 25 22 April 2011 at 12:28am | IP Logged | |||||
However will it achieve critical mass as a simple accounting by number of speakers doesn't mean much. It ties back to Ostler's observations on the identity, distribution and political/cultural/economic/social clout of those speakers. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dr. POW Groupie Canada Joined 4966 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Studies: German, English* Studies: French | Message 22 of 25 22 April 2011 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I doubt that Mandarin is going to have the influence in the future that a lot of people
expect it to have. Mandarin has no articles, along with several other languages, and that means a lot has to be interpreted from context. Languages with gender-based nouns are a lot more difficult to learn from the ground-up than a language without gender-based nouns. Declensions in grammatical case and gender make a language more difficult as well. Basically, I don't think a perfectly literate world will exist in which everybody knows every grammatical rules of any language. Therefore, the more flexible a language is in communicating an idea, the better. I'm thinking no genders, very little to no declensions, flexible syntax, massive vocabulary, etc. Of course, this is just my opinion, and even I think it's a dumb one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5094 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 23 of 25 27 April 2011 at 7:12am | IP Logged | |||||
These numbers are not terribly large. Not nearly on the scale that the Chinese are learning English. Mandarin needs to be the lingua franca in China before it takes over elsewhere. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 24 of 25 27 April 2011 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
Mandarin is and has been for decades the uncontested lingua franca in China. English is learned to communicate with foreigners. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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