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The 10 most influential languages | ||
Tags: Language Importance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Cyrus Diglot Newbie France Joined 5508 days ago 39 posts - 70 votes  Speaks: French*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Mandarin | Message 17 of 40 21 March 2010 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
All languages have regional variations. As far as I know me too (^^), mandarin is one language, the variations are not enough important to justify that there are several languages called "mandarin". I agree that "very close to each other" was quite excessive, especially concerning cantonese and mandarin. I do not know cantonese at all, but since it is the same writing, I suppose that the structure of the language is quite similar, even if the pronunciations are very different (6 tons in cantonese, isn't it ? Oh man !!!). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jon1991 Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5365 days ago 98 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, Russian | Message 18 of 40 21 March 2010 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Mandarin is underrated on the list.
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| Cherepaha Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6589 days ago 126 posts - 175 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Spanish, Polish, Latin, French | Message 20 of 40 22 March 2010 at 10:43am | IP Logged | |||||
The high school district that my daughter goes to in the San Francisco Bay Area had replaced all the German language instruction with Mandarin four years ago. The popularity of language study choices is #1 (=most popular by far) = Spanish, #2 = French, #3 = Mandarin Chinese. Instruction is provided by the native speakers, as there is a considerable population of Mandarin native speakers living in California. There is not enough work for an instructor within any one school, however. Consequently, the teacher has to be running between a few schools within the district on any given day in order to have a full work load. Edited by Cherepaha on 22 March 2010 at 10:44am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| markchapman Diglot Groupie Taiwan tesolzone.com/ Joined 5472 days ago 44 posts - 55 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Portuguese | Message 21 of 40 22 March 2010 at 10:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Mandarin is growing in popularity around the world, but this list is for the most influential languages. Outside of
China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; Mandarin has had very little influence. Perhaps in the future it will become more influential, but so far this hasn't really happened. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jimbo Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6294 days ago 469 posts - 642 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Japanese, Latin | Message 22 of 40 22 March 2010 at 12:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Exactly, nothing to see here. Move along, move along. Let's have a look at stock market capitalizations as a percentage of the global stock market capitalization. Today's numbers are: 6.72% China 4.93% Hong Kong 1.52% Taiwan 0.98% Singapore 14.15% Subtotal 30.41% United States 3.68% Canada 2.80% Brazil 0.83% Mexico 6.25% United Kingdom 3.84% France 2.80% Germany 1.48% Switzerland 7.75% Japan 1.83% Korea (South) 2.90% India 2.75% Australia Edited by jimbo on 22 March 2010 at 1:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5430 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 23 of 40 22 March 2010 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A very interesting article despite some value judgments that I found a bit questionable. The article does give a very good portrait of something that we all knew. No surprises here.
Most of the debate centers on Chinese or Mandarin because of an interesting combination of factors. Obviously, China has become a major economic superpower. The language is spoken by a huge but geographically concentrated population. Mandarin is also one of the hardest languages to learn for Westerners. Quite naturally, there is a huge interest in the West in learning Chinese because it is considered a key for doing business in China and because of China's increasing influence on the world scene. It reminds me a bit of the interest in Russian in the 60s and 70s because of geopolitics. Given all of this, is Chinese destined to become a future lingua franca with English, French and Spanish? Maybe, in a very distant future. In my opinion, the combination of geographic concentration and inherent difficulty are enormous barriers to Mandarin becoming an international language of communication. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 24 of 40 22 March 2010 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If smart gadgets make it possible to read/transcribe Chinese and Japanese writing without any problems, would it then give those two languages a boost?
Of course it wouldn't change the basic assumption that Chinese and Japanese people really like to have difficult languages, but those languages might become somewhat more accessible. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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