Chinese may replace English in this century

[Loriquero]

Well, those are not the wikipedia numbers, but well... is wikipedia Do we have some realiable source for the number of spanish speakers in the US?

Or maybe is so offtopic,

[crazy-meiguoren]

Chinese won't replace English anytime soon. It is a language to be reckoned with as China becomes a larger economic presence in the world. 300 million Americans aren't going to give up English without a fight. Many Americans already resent being told to "Press 1 for English, Press 2 for Spanish" when they get a company's voice mail. The label "Made in China" is not very popular here - it has come to symbolize the vanishing of American manufacturing jobs. I am not saying I agree with my fellow countrymen's xenophobic statements. I'm just reporting the current mood amongst many US citizens.

English has changed over the centuries and continues to change. It is a highly versatile language. Coming from an island that was vulnerable to attack by virtually every coastal European country, so many words have been added to its vocabulary from so many sources that it's no wonder that the language doesn't follow its own rules of phonics much of the time. On top of that, it acquires words from the places it has colonized.

I think that it's a good thing that the Chinese written language has changed very little over the centuries. The spoken language has changed over the years, though. A modern Chinese speaker may be able to communicate with Confucious in writing, but not speaking.

[spitzig]

English doesn't have to decrease in popularity in the US for it to be the lingua franca. Just that Americans will be wise to learn it to do international business. But, one of the strengths of a lingua franca is that sometimes two people are more likely to share the lingua franca than their native language.Take a Portuguese man and a Polish man trying to do business with each other. Or, a Vietnamese man and a Korean man.

This means a lot of inertia.

I think most people here believe that Chinese will increase in popularity in the future. But, that degree of increase is WAY too difficult to predict. For example, in the near future, in order for China's economy to keep getting better, they will have to keep doing more and more international business. AND, this will mean learning the current lingua franca.

[Loriquero]

What about Chinese becoming a lingua franca in asia?

[Don_Horhe]

I think that English has already passed the point of no return - it is too deeply rooted in almost every aspect of international relations, media and communication, entertainment, etc. There would have to be an unprecedented shift in global geopolitics (like a third world war or something) for this to change. What I think will happen is that there will be 2 or more 'local' lingua francas - English globally, Chinese for East Asia and eventually French and Spanish respectively for parts of Africa and South America.

I recommend David Crystal's "English as a Global Language" - he presents very interesting facts about the spread of English and the reasons behind it.

[anonymoose]

I think that it's a good thing that the Chinese written language has changed very little over the centuries. The spoken language has changed over the years, though. A modern Chinese speaker may be able to communicate with Confucious in writing, but not speaking.

I think this is a fallacy that is often put around to give Chinese some status over other languages. A modern Chinese speaker would not be able to communicate with Confucius in writing unless they had specifically learnt classical chinese. And in this case, it is no different to anyone learning any ancient language. The only difference is that classical chinese is routinely learnt by Chinese students in middle school, but from what I've seen, not many people master it to a level where they would actually be able to communicate with it. And the other thing that people seem to forget is that the characters used today are quite different in appearance to those used two and a half thousand years ago, not to mention the simplification of the last fifty years. If you really want to consider how the written language has changed, then you need to consider the characters as well. Otherwise it's like saying that except for all the changes, Chinese hasn't changed much.

What I think will happen is that there will be 2 or more 'local' lingua francas - English globally, Chinese for East Asia and eventually French and Spanish respectively for parts of Africa and South America.

What do you mean "eventually French and Spanish respectively for parts of Africa and South America"? Aren't French and Spanish already the lingua francas in those parts of the world? If anything, as their economies develop and the people become more globally mobile, they are more likely to take on English or whatever happens to be the main lingua franca at the time as their lingua franca. However, I think this will be quite a long-term phenomenon (hundreds of years rather than decades) and on that timescale, it is difficult to predict what the linguistic landscape will be like.

[Meng Lelan]

What about Chinese becoming a lingua franca in asia?

This is an excellent question. Koreans are really into learning Chinese. But how do the Japanese feel about Chinese being the lingua franca in Asia?

[atitarev]

Chinese is a popular foreign language in Japan now I can tell by a few articles I read and even some TV series I watched but it doesn't mean that Japanese are becoming good at it, especially pronunciation (Japanese people also have problem with the English pronunciation but they are still understood).

As some other posters said, Chinese may have difficulty becoming a lingua franca, as it's different from all other languages and doesn't absorb foreign words easily. So, for any given local reality, most of the time, you need to know the Chinese term for it, which is difficult.

With the Japanese words - they may be borrowed along with their characters but the pronunciation becomes unrecognisable, e.g. 俳句 (haiku) is "páijù" in Chinese Mandarin.

The situation in some countries could be different if Mandarin were a major and a very important subject at school, like in Malaysian Chinese school where there is a lot of focus on Chinese studies.

I talked to someone who came from outer Mongolia, I was glad that many Mongolians can still speak Russian or understand Russian. However, despite the closeness of China and new realities, Mongolians are much better with the Russian language than with Chinese. Note that Russian and Mongolian are completely unrelated languages, although there are many borrowings from Russian and they still use the Cyrillic script.

[Don_Horhe]

What do you mean "eventually French and Spanish respectively for parts of Africa and South America"? Aren't French and Spanish already the lingua francas in those parts of the world?

I guess you're right. What I meant was that the number official languages used by organizations like MERCOSUR (currently has 3 - Spanish, Portuguese and German), or the African Union (6 official languages) will gradually narrow down to the ones I mentioned above. I forgot to include Russian as a 'local lingua franca', which is widely spoken, or at least understood, outside Russia and in countries of the former USSR. But then again, as you also said, it is difficult to predict what the future holds for global languages, so we can only speculate.

[fanglu]

MERCOSUR (currently has 3 - Spanish, Portuguese and German)

I think was a typo - should be Guarani. I doubt there are anywhere near enough German speakers in Latin America to justify it being an official language.

[Loriquero]

MERCOSUR (currently has 3 - Spanish, Portuguese and German), or the African Union (6 official languages) will gradually narrow down to the ones I mentioned above.

european union has 24 official languages; maybe they can hold their meetings in english, french, german or whatever, but I don't think that they are going to narrow down their official languages, at least on paper.... For the organization of american states, the secretary has almost always been from a spanish speaking country, with the exception of one brazilian and one "american" that was in charge for a short time. And for what I have seen, all the meetings are hold in spanish.

Edited October 26, 2009 at 02:43 AM by Loriquero

[Daan]

The EU has one of the mightiest armies of translators to enable everyone to speak their own language during their meetings. As an EU citizen, I can tell you that that's one of the scariest thing about the entire bureaucracy. Funny, I accidentally typed bureaucrazy there ;P I doubt the EU will adopt one official language anytime soon, even if it's only for their meetings. There's simply too many countries that won't budge.

[atitarev]

That's true but it's interesting what the actual popular languages will be in the future in the EU. There are maps in Wikipedia showing ability of Europeans speaking different languages - English, German, French, Spanish and even Russian, which is not an official language of the EU (it's one of working languages of the EU) but still widely spoken.

It's easy to predict that the biggest languages will continue to enjoy the popularity, as they are now taught in Eastern Europe, unfortunately replacing Russian (it may regain popularity). If German companies deals with Scandinavia, Poland, Hungary, Czechia, it's obviously German, not the other smaller language, which is used for communication more often. So despite the number of languages in Europe, some are used much more frequently than others on a daily basis and there is common understanding that it's not so easy to find a translation into a smaller language. English is one of very popular languages in Europe, so if Swiss businesses (not a member) deal with Holland, the correspondence is often in English. German is better known than English in Eastern Europe, not so much because of the education but because of frequent contacts with Germany but this may change with some more focus on English.

[Daan]

Yes, that's definitely true. There's a big difference between EU policy and reality. As a native speaker of Dutch, who went to school in the Netherlands, I am supposed to be able to speak German. But when I talk to someone from Germany, it'll usually be in English, save for occassions such as buying bread or so.

There's also a trend towards English in many, many universities. More and more English textbooks are being prescribed, more and more classes are being taught in English, even though official government policy doesn't allow this. But it's better than the alternative, which is using outdated course material or not having a qualified teacher.

[atitarev]

Yes, and in Malta, Ireland or Luxembourg no-one expects you to speak their language (alternative). Even in Sweden, you can get away by just speaking English, which some immigrants do - all their life. To get to this level for the Chinese language, it should be first known well and used often outside China. Predictions are good but it may be a wishful thinking for some...

[Don_Horhe]

I think was a typo - should be Guarani. I doubt there are anywhere near enough German speakers in Latin America to justify it being an official language.

Yup, my bad - Guarani, not German.

Anyway, we should not overlook the difference between de jure official languages and those which are most commonly used; take for instance Greek, Romanian and Bulgarian - they are all official and working languages of the EU, but they're nowhere near English, German and French in terms of frequency of usage. Moreover, translations in most meetings are language X -> English and then English -> language Y - it would be quite difficult to find and impractical to have expert translators for every language pair, so English is oftentimes used as an intermediary language. Of course, official documents are issued in every language, but that is just a gesture of support for linguistic pluralism and equality among member states.

[Daan]

Yeah, that's true. Just to get an idea of the staggering amount of work they do there:

The European Parliament alone employs up to 1,000 interpreters for its full sessions. With 506 possible language combinations the interpreters often work via a third, or "relay", language, such as English.

[renzhe]

As some other posters said, Chinese may have difficulty becoming a lingua franca, as it's different from all other languages and doesn't absorb foreign words easily. So, for any given local reality, most of the time, you need to know the Chinese term for it, which is difficult.

On the other hand, Chinese has exported a huge number of words into neighbouring languages, particularly Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. A staggering number of words in both Vietnamese and Korean originally came from Chinese.

Most (South-)Koreans and Japanese are well versed in the script already.

[atitarev]

On the other hand, Chinese has exported a huge number of words into neighbouring languages, particularly Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese. A staggering number of words in both Vietnamese and Korean originally came from Chinese.

Most (South-)Koreans and Japanese are well versed in the script already.

I attended Chinese classes with the Japanese and Japanese classes with the Chinese. Despite all similarities, my observation is that East-Asian students are not far ahead the Australian classmates, except for some writing exercises. It does somewhat reduce the learning time, though. The grammar and vocabulary (as the words are pronounced, not written) are very different.

Recognising the meaning of many nouns helps but they still need to look up the pronunciation of unknown words. Without the basics of the language, Chinese can understand very little of the Japanese text (or vice versa), even if they recognise some significant words (often wrong), it's a myth. Very often they get the meanings of the sentences wrong because they are missing the linking words, negation, etc.

Maybe you're right. I am watching (having finished yet) "OL Nippon" (OL にっぽん) drama. There are two young Chinese girls working in a Japanese company, doing the job well, despite poor speaking skills (one of them). Most of the tasks are written and they both cope well, faster than Japanese. They idea was to show how industrious Chinese people are.

OL Nippon

[bniu1]

tanklao,

As a 2nd gen chinese-american, I got two words for you: "Keep Dreaming"

Sure, there are alot of people that speak Chinese, and I do speak a few words myself. The problem is, there is no way to sound out those chinese characters. Sure, you have a few words like one, two, three which are easy to remember, but for the most part, the language is much too cumbersome to deal with. In a quarter of the time that it will take me to master some basic chinese, I can master all the western european languages, and remember them competently. The illiteracy rate in China is really high and will be really high because people aren't going to be able to memorize all those words. Now if China went completely to pinyin, then the literacy rate will skyrocket. I remember in elementary school when I couldn't spell a word, my teacher just told me to sound it out. Guess what, it worked! English isn't that hard to learn and once you master it, it's not that hard to go master French or Spanish. I chose French as my foreign language for college, and it was quite easy to learn. They do have a lot of silent letters but for the most part, they're quite easy to spell out.

Did I learn Chinese as a kid? yes. Can I pronounce the words correctly? yes. Do I remember how to read or write more than 1-2% of the words I learned? No. And you also got to consider the relatively inflexibility of the counting system in China. I know the people there say wan for 10,000 and then say shi wan for 100,000 and the thing I found interesting was that if someone there asked me how much a car costs in America, I say something like er shi qian (twenty thousand literally, my pinyin may not be accurate), their brains freeze up like they all of a sudden can't do math (ironic huh?). Sure, it may not be correct, but come on, can't they do 20 x 1000 = 20,000 in their head? In english, you're supposed to say 2500 as two thousand, five hundred but it's perfectly acceptable to say twenty-five hundred. You can also say 25,000 as two hundred fifty hundred if you wanted to but no one's going to waste their breathe that much...

I don't like the wan system of counting at all, it just adds to too much confusion, many chinese ppl in the US have trouble converting from chinese to english with large numbers. The rest of the world uses the thousand, million, billion system, for the sake of consistency, china outta hop on board. It's an international world, things are going to mix, it's perfectly fine to respect your heritage but you also have to move forward. Look at Shakespear english, if you spoke like that on a street today, people would think you're an idiot.

I agree with a previous poster that English is beyond the point of no return. To move forward, we all need to converge on a few common languages, and in the process, get more people to speak standard english. Since I was in china this summer, I can say from one observation about chinese accented english, it's way too choppy, way too monotone, and they leave out a lot of "articles". They need to learn of the existence of the words: "the" "an" "a" "of" etc... English can be very tonal too, up tone implies question, down tone implies shouting, regular implies normal tone, words can get dragged out, the varying speed of the sentence can imply different things. since chinese is also a tonal language, why they don't speak english with tones is a mystery to me...