Chinese may replace English in this century

[ipsi()]

Chinese takes up more storage space. English only needs to encode about 100 or so characters in order to be able to display the majority of written dialog. Given how computers work, that means English needs one byte per character. Chinese, assuming that it becomes the only language worth knowing, would need at least two, and three for those characters that are quite rare. Or more probably three per character to able to encode simplified and traditional in the same set (otherwise you won't be able to read all those old classics). So it takes more space to store Chinese documents on a computer than it does to store English documents. That's just how it goes.

There's also concerns over here about falling literacy. I'm not sure why... It's not exactly hard to learn to read and write. I know that my little brother has real issues writing. He can read really well, but he struggles to write anything. Too many things to attribute it to though. Me and my sister, on the other hand, are able to write just fine.

My girlfriend also complained that the classics were hard to read, and she didn't enjoy them during high school. I know that I was taught some Shakespear, and I could read it without too much trouble, though it was a bit of a pain, and the meaning was unclear in places due to archaic usages, but it was still readable. And Beowulf and suchlike are written in a different language, basically. A friend of mine was able to meet a requirement that she know a foreign language by studying Old English.

[imron]

Chinese, assuming that it becomes the only language worth knowing, would need at least two, and three for those characters that are quite rare.

And, for something like utf-8, Chinese requires a minimum of 3 bytes per character, and can use up to 6 for those characters not on the BMP.

[skylee]

Where is the "generate more heat than light" reply? Or is it still too early?

[outcast]

Doesn't this guy have anything better to do?

[Loriquero]

putting aside the linguistic argument, do you think that chinese is really becoming a more useful tool than english?

I think this would be a truth for most of the asian people. because of the chinese influence on these countries would be stronger than others from english speaker countries in media, business and so on...

[outcast]

putting aside the linguistic argument, do you think that chinese is really becoming a more useful tool than english?

I think this would be a truth for most of the asian people. because of the chinese influence on these countries would be stronger than others from english speaker countries in media, business and so on...

In China it always has been and always will be more useful than English, but it isn't becoming more useful outside of China by a long shot. Chinese influence in Asia hasn't been strong for over 100 years. All of these asian countries make learning english a requirement as early as middle school, but except in china there is no such requirement for chinese. English is the lingua franca because for the last 300 years the dominant country (actually UK and after WW2, US) in the world has been english speaking.

[Pravit]

I know everybody loves a pile-on, but give this guy a break! It's his first post.

Of course it's silly to try to prove that any language is superior to another, but Chinese could very well take the position of "most commonly learned second language" for other reasons. English has only enjoyed that status for the past 50 years, if you exclude India and other colonies. I'd actually say Russian was a strong rival to English when the Soviet Union was still around - besides the millions in the various Soviet Socialist Republics who learned it, it was a pretty common language to learn in the Eastern Bloc and other countries aligned with the Soviets. I still see plenty of older men in Chinese bookshops browsing the Russian section. Come to think of it, even plenty of Americans and Western Europeans from that generation studied Russian.

But that's beside the point - we all know that English, or Russian, or French, or Latin, all gained that status purely because of political and economic reasons. It seems like everybody and his dog are learning English these days, but when those people have school-age children of their own, the political climate could be vastly different - who's to say that the US will stay the world economic superpower forever? As China grows in economic importance, I imagine Chinese will spread first to the other East Asian countries and Southeast Asia - even now, it seems almost all career-minded Koreans learn Chinese these days. And the Chinese are already an important political and economic force in the southeast Asian countries. You might start to see Chinese pop up in American and European high schools as a foreign language option alongside French, German, and Spanish. More people would learn Chinese for business reasons. And so on.

I don't think it will simply replace English - the US and other English-speaking countries will stay economically important for a long time to come - but it might become a very common second or third language to learn. Personally, I think Chinese is already much more important than German or French, but there are still plenty of American high school students who learn those as a foreign language.

[Outofin]

Chinese becoming a world language is inevitable, for the same reasons that English has become a world language. I think the shift of language is a very natural but slow progress that may take centuries.

The Chinese preschool my daughter attends has an American kid who has no Chinese relatives. The owner of the school, one of my Chinese friends, was surprised about his coming and is very proud of the kid. It was definitely unthinkable before. I think the school is benefiting from the growing interest in learning Chinese among Americans.

In sci-fi series FireFly, (I'm not citing evidence, it just occurred to me. ), people all occasionally speak in Chinese, as they all know a few phrases such as 马上！懂了吗？, just like most know "hello", "thank you" nowadays. I know it might be only intended to create some exotic futuristic feelings, but the future according to it makes a lot of sense to me.

[82riceballs]

this article looks more like an attempt to justify nationalism (or ethnocentrism) than to prove a valid point...

bad choice for a first post, imo.

If Chinese were going to become a global language, then why do Chinese people learn English? there is no such thing as language superiority, just languages that are easier to learn, speak, read, etc. get SUPERIORITY out of your head, buddy!

[Pravit]

If Chinese were going to become a global language, then why do Chinese people learn English?

Because English is the most important language right now. Nobody can predict the future.

there is no such thing as language superiority, just languages that are easier to learn, speak, read, etc.

English didn't reach its position because it's easy to learn, speak, or read. I think everyone would agree English spelling is horrible and doesn't really reflect the pronunciation very well. And for Chinese speakers, English pronunciation is actually quite difficult.

[tanklao]

I am so sorry that I haven't been here for so long. These days I should prepare for my exams, and still I should do lots of experiments.

I am a biological Ph. D and I don't have so much time to do research on the comparation between Chinese and English. The English teacher asked us to write an article as our homework, and I just did it.

I just wanted to make it special and funny. In the article I segguested that US gov use Chinese to protect the environment. I surely acknoleadged that this is absolutely impossible. What I wanted to say is that written Chinese is more informative than English and may save lots of paper if we use it as an official language. In fact the waste of paper consist of many factors, which I do know.

I wrote this arctile just in order to remind peeple that Chinese in fact is not so bad and so hard to learn as it is supposed to be. Unfortunately very few people stand by my side both in China and abroad. I have posted this article in PKUCN

, where I suffer almost the same situation I suffer here.

[BrandeX]

I know everybody loves a pile-on, but give this guy a break! It's his first post.

Also known as a "troll".

[tanklao]

3. Have you ever heard of an English-speaking Indian/African who fail to communicate with British/American in written form? There is a standardization of English ("Standard English"), with just a few spelling/vocab varieties. As far as I'm aware, Singaporean English do not use Singlish varieties in formal written communication.

"Just as Australian and New Zealand English have developed in their own directions, so it is with Indian English"[*].

If every country is doing like this, how can English serves as an international language. And this is just what is happening now. We should face the reality.

In my institute(one of CAS) there are tree Indians. Most of Ph. D and professors here, some of which have been studied in USA for several years, have language problems to communicate with them. Still there is an Croatial Ph. D here, and he also suffers the same difficulty. Once I have heard two indian guys talking togother, and I can hardly understand one word. I doubt that "is this English?" Serveral days ago I made a call to an Indian friends in Chennai, Tamilnadu, my friends was not there, and it took me quite some time to get the information where my friends went. I am quite confident of my English as I get 85 points in my CET4, 80.5 pionts in CET6 and B+ in CET-spoken Englis test, which is quite above the average level in China.

[Pravit]

Also known as a "troll".

There's trolls (malicious ones), and then there's trolls (clueless, easy targets). At any rate, I still think the topic is interesting, even if I don't agree with the "inherent superiority" argument.

If every country is doing like this, how can English serves as an international language.

It's not particularly well-suited to being an international language, but neither is Chinese (or Esperanto or Interlingua for that matter). There's no international authority saying we should all learn English - people just do it because they think it's important. But sooner or later, the same thing will happen with Chinese. And Azerbaijani. And Somali. And Saami. I, for one, welcome our new nomadic reindeer-herding overlords!

[rob07]

鲁迅, who knew more about language than most, said: "汉字不灭，中国必亡!" (if Chinese characters aren't extinguished, China is doomed!). It's good to see someone trying to make the case for the other side. If the alphabet is not eradicated, Western civilisation will be wiped out!

[mr.stinky]

"In the article I segguested that US gov use Chinese to protect the environment."

what? replace coal-burning power plants with chinese-burning ones?

yes, this could work by replacing fossil fuels with a resource mass-produced by

unskilled labour. PETA, however, would have a cow.

[Pravit]

And Mr. Stinky wins with tasteless joke of the day!

[Shadowdh]

Yeah but funny though...

[tanklao]

鲁迅, who knew more about language than most, said: "汉字不灭，中国必亡!" (if Chinese characters aren't extinguished, China is doomed!). It's good to see someone trying to make the case for the other side. If the alphabet is not eradicated, Western civilisation will be wiped out!

I don't think so. Chinese is a compatible language. Unlike English in which you put some chinese characters the readers are feeling unbearable, Modern Chinese is more friendly to any other language.

4. Have you ever pondered the fact that if English-speakers were schooled in their mother tongue to the same degree as their Chinese counterparts, they would most probably be able to read Beowulf fluently. Whilst Chinese primary school kids (and even middle school kids) spend most of their Chinese lesson time learning how to read and write. In western schools, the mother tongue classes past the first year of school are spent developing other skills, such as presentation skills or critical thinking skills. If western kids spent years memorizing rarely used and ancient vocabulary (I'm assuming that you'd need some grasp of classical chinese to read the classics), they would be at no disadvantage understanding very old literature. The difference is just that western educationalists did not find it quite as important as the Chinese.

This is not true. As far as I know, Chinese chindren spend only 3 years to memorized common used characters and spend more time in reading and practise. I don't know what this buddy experenced when he/she was a child, but today this is the case. Lots of students finish reading the Romance of Three Kingdom, when he or she is in Grade 3 or 4. The lack of language skill is due to the teaching system and the nature of Chinese culture in stead of the language factors. It is true that it not a problem for Chinese children to read novel and common newspaper when they are just in Grade 4. When I was at that age, it was quite popular to read the novels written by Jin Yong and we were able to enjoy them. But It's unlikely that the native English peers can read the equivalence. And this is the language difference.

5. Your vocabulary comparison is quite not interesting. In almost all cases, the English words mean exactly the same as their Chinese counterparts: it's just that their word roots are usually in greek or latin. And, yes, we do have common names for biological species (flowers, plants, animals) in the West to (although you might be mislead to thing we do not if you visit the Beijing botanical garden, for instance.

I know that English does have some common words for what I have listed. But in the field of sciences, do the scientist use what you call commons for their terms. I am a Ph D of biology and I know clearly that the answear is NO! Take fish for example, sturgeon, carp, salmon, trout, steelhead, barracuda,ikan, dace, scup, cyprinoid, carp, tench, eel, loach et al are all in fact a kind of fish. Can a native English speaker know that they are in fact are a kind of fish. In Chinese, however, an 8 years old kid can tell you that they are fish as the Characters all share a radical that means fish. Don't you think that this is very reasonable? That reasonable is also true to the scientific terms. In Chinese it not a big problem for a molecular biologist to read the specialized paper for micro-electronics. The same is true for micro-electronist to read biological specialized paper. Most of the terms imply their meaning by the Characters, which I have given a example of the word microsytin. In English, however, a genetist have language problems to communicate with an evironmental engeer on their research, which I have exprenced in an international workshop, although genetics and evironmental engeering are far far close than that between molecular biology and micro-electronics. Don't you think that Chinese language is more suitable to sciences. Don't ask me why China failed to develop sciences! This is due to the lack of introducing the greek civilization which is supposed to be a nesseccity of modern sciences instead of the language disadvantage. Nowadays scientists are suffering the ridiculous English terms they have made. This is absolutely true! If they choose Chinese language, they will enjoy the terms they have made. For example, "Alzheimers" is "早老年痴呆症 zaolaonianchidaizheng“ in Chinese. Once you read it you can't forget it. Even if you are layman of life science and have never read this term before, once you meet it you can easily understand its meaning. In English, however, it is really a torment to memerize the "Alzheimers" for which the English explanation is "a progressive form of presenile dementia that is similar to senile dementia except that it usually starts in the 40s or 50s", where you are still puzzled by the terms "senile dementia" that means ”severe mental deterioration in old age, characterized by loss of memory and lack of control of bodily functions“. This is a reality of language challenge for English that serves as a science language.

[imron]

In Chinese, however, an 8 years old kid can tell you that they are fish as the Characters all share a radical that means fish.

Yes, and I personally find the sheep-fish 鲜 to be particularly tasty. Luckily I know that, unlike English, Chinese doesn't have any potentially confusing characters, and you can always tell the meaning, just by looking at the component parts.