I really doubt that English will be supplanted by Chinese, Chinese is way too hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness of their horrible writing system. The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese loanwords. The world will never learn their characters.
But I would note that spelling in English over the last 20 years has rapidly gotten more fluid, thanks perhaps to texting.
I don't think we'll ever overcome the damage the timing of the great vowel shift[1] did, but perhaps in 50 years time it might be somewhat improved.
[1] "English spelling was first becoming standardized in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that English spellings now often strongly deviate in their representation of English pronunciations."
I could really see Mandarin take off if they would adopt a writing system similar to Vietnamese.
Numbers are a great example of that. We all have our own words for numbers, but can all communicate it with its associated symbols (which are different in arabic script for instance, though everyone's agreed on european script).
Mathematics is full of those symbols we communicate with regardless of their pronunciation in different languages, e.g. the 'for all' and 'there exist' symbols for instance, but also the equal sign and the integral, set notation etc etc. They're all concept, ideas, and have associated symbols.
So why wouldn't we all use chinese 'synbols' for our 'everyday' vocabulary when we write. It's be harder to learn to read 1 language, but so much easier to learn to read all of them.
When we communicate in western languages an idea I from person A to person B; then when A translate I into a translation t in a language l that both A and B understand. then B translates back t into I'. It's actually pretty hard to get I' to equal I. Where as with chinese characters, my understanding is their characters are closer to the ideas themselves. Potentially making it easier to communicate between each other across multiple languages.
They could also easily introduce a second, easier, writing system, and maintain a low-high kind of language (like many countries do). Eventually the second easier one will tend to dominate, but even until then, it will be easier for foreigners to learn it, and for chinese to learn both.
Not many other arguments are needed. But it does offer another argument -- or at least implies it: the world where English speaking powers loomed large is now changing. Previous peripheral countries and market emerge -- China, India, and so on. Even inside the US, Spanish is growing faster than ever.
So while English might not be "supplanted by Chinese", it will be supplanted, either by a more balanced mix of languages playing more major roles (English, Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc), so by a mixed-up patois style dialect -- as predicted by some sci-fi films long ago, and as lived in many multicultural places like Singapore.
But the headline is asking if we're at the peak of English's dominance. That question requires a lot more than "everything comes to an end" or "global languages never lasted forever before" to answer it in the affirmative.
English isn't necessarily a great language, and it's not all that accessible (Spanish is more accessible, certainly). But it is the only contender that is sufficiently accessible to ensure continued dominance.
But is it getting established or just temporarily flaring up due to immigration? All of the 2nd generation Spanish-speaking immigrants I know use English primarily.
American English is the lingua franca and the language of education (especially advanced education) and the economically successful. Unless those things change, I don't see Spanish as getting any more established than other immigrant languages that have now died out in the US.
It will end up being in tonnes of films, articles, everywhere. So long as it's pervasive people will just end up learning it naturally, it doesn't matter what the origins are or what it's called
So long as communication increases and barring conflict, we'll all eventually find a happy medium for inter-communication
Interesting example, since many people claim Singapore’s adoption of English heavily contributed to their rapid economic growth. Lee Kuan Yew himself said, “The key to avoid falling behind the world is English.”
But never before have we had a globalized world today like before. What happened before was a civilization would rise, have influence, and then collapse and be replaced by another with a whole different culture, including the language.
Now we have a single economy and technology, popular entertainment, and so on, and it will never go away (baring global ecological catastrophe), and English just happens to be its language. The costs of keeping it all but changing the language in midstream are just far to high to ever happen.
The cons of the written language far outweigh the pros. It can’t be denied that it takes far longer to learn than anything else.
also, it can be read horizontally AND vertically without needing to disassemble the graphemes or rotating your head 90 degrees. good luck doing that with english!
Chinese written language, I agree, is a challenge for people used to alphabetic languages.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this brainwashing.
And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that: it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries, people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English.
Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling language.
When I was visiting Portugal I stayed with two people, one from Portugal and the other from Spain. They had been living together for months before I joined them, and speaking to each other in their native languages.
I was a unilingual Anglophone, and to accommodate me, they both spoke English in my presence. It was only through the medium of English that they discovered that they had misunderstood each other for months about various things.
The fact that Spanish and Portuguese were similar lulled them in to a false sense of comprehension, when in fact there are many false friends (cognates) and divergent nuances.
I'm told this happens a lot among Scandinavians too, and Danish is known to be especially difficult for Norwegians and Swedes to comprehend completely, so many fall back on English to avoid misunderstandings.
Going further, I've found that the mainstream Swedish dialect is probably more mutually intelligible with the mainstream Norwegian dialect than some of the more obscure regional Norwegian dialects (and I say this as someone who grew up speaking one of those regional dialects).
Switching to English doesn't require people from different countries, though. While in Helsinki Finnish-native and Swedish-native speakers typically speak Finnish with each other, there are parts of Finland where Swedish-speakers might not be fluent in Finnish and the most efficient mutual language with Finnish-speakers (who often aren't fluent in Swedish) is English.
Several unlikely scenarios I can think of that would cause English to no longer be the top lingua franca of the world:
* aliens arrive and force us all to learn their language * technological breakthrough that allows extreme rapid language learning, everyone learns English of course, but they learn a bunch of other languages at the same time
Japanese Example: http://www.ibanez.co.jp/index.html
Chinese Example: http://www.ibanez.com/cn/
That's a bit short-sighted , the article is talking about centuries. Nevertheless it's probably correct that english will become even more widespread over the next century, in particular i think it will become a lot more mainstream in europe as the second language of necessity.
Yes, it is, I agree. But I just find it futile to forecast what will happen after I am dead.
Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking countries.
The problem English has with pronunciation is that we have a habit of insisting on importing foreign words with foreign pronunciations and insisting that they be spelled with their foreign spelling. Even if the source language isn't written in Latin script. (Bonus points for people who insist on using foreign case rules for converting to plurals, and double bonus points for people who do it wrong and insist that the wrong way is the most correct spelling.)
Just Spanish-style accent marks for some of the polysyllabic words would be a win, but it doesn't really matter. No matter where you put the stress on, say, "authoritative", people will understand which word you meant. If we did adopt stress diacritics we'd end up with more homophones that differ only in stress, which would complicate an already complex language unnecessarily.
I like English as it is.
It wasn't, it was just the primary language for diplomacy. Other languages were the de facto standard for other things e.g. English for maritime usage, German for science and maths.
What's unusual about the current situation is that English dominates in the fields that have the most global reach: international trade, music/film/TV and technology. This is almost exclusively due to US hegemony in these fields for the last 70 odd years.
What is also unusual about the current situation is how quickly things can change on a global scale. As such, I also don't see any reason to believe that English will dominate indefinitely.
But I also see no reason why we'll move to another single, hegemonic language. Dominant languages might split by function again or special purpose languages may spring up. I see embryonic versions of the latter in my children's electronic communications.
Once the communists fell and capitalism took over English sort of became lingua-franca for business communication, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any people using it for personal communication the same as they were using French before WW2. Not trying to refute your observation or anything, which I find entirely correct, just wanted to add a small piece of language trivia.
I suppose kids these days have access to online content in whatever their native language is, but when I was growing English was the only option.
Hopefully peak English has been reached.
I would rather assume that it says a lot about how invested they are in popular culture and casual learning, because learning Klingon might actually be a fun diversion, and a lot less effort than learning Mandarin or Arabic.
Maybe people like to occasionally do things just for fun instead of for practical reasons.
Also, where's your evidence that the people learning High Valyrian and Klingon aren't also learning Chinese, Russian, Spanish, etc.?
Drop down to students at a merely second-tier university, or people a little older, or top-tier students who don't bother to approach foreigners because they know there's no hope, and you'll find people with even less English than that.
That is partially about economic power (if your country offers many good jobs, people near you have an incentive to learn your language), and partially about military power (if you can make another country speak your language at gunpoint, at least in government-related jobs, their economical power becomes another argument for learning your language).
Therefore the popularity of Chinese will depend on how easy it will be for people who learn Chinese to increase their income. Compared with the expected increase of income from learning English.
Argument "but most important people in China speak English anyway" is less relevant if learning Chinese provides you even better advantage from cooperating with them. For example, most people in Germany speak English, but I suppose that being fluent in German still makes it easier to find a job in Germany.
I can see some people learning a specific language because they plan to work with/in a specific country but I can't think of any language that seriously rivals english as a universal language.
China might supplant the US as the consumer market but it will take a long time for the rest of the world to adapt to its language. Japanese, German and Russian doesn't even hold a candle to English dominance during the 20th century even though the German and Japanese economy were going very strong and the Soviet Union had a very powerful presence. Even in Finland English edged out Russian.
There's even a word for it, "Finlandization", which means not upsetting the super power right next door even though you secretly really don't like it.
But since Finland wanted to have access to the global, capitalist market English was the way forward. I don't think national pride made them break away from the Soviet sphere of influence it was money, and English is still the language of global business. Until the opportunity cost of learning some other language than English for your field is too big countries will most likely stick with English.
English is the beginnings of a global language. The language of human beings, rather than just the language of a particular culture or nationality. More people speak English than any other language. More people are learning English as second language than any other language. It's the defacto language of international business, the sky, the sea, of science, of movies, television, and games, and most importantly of the internet itself. There is more information available on any topic, in English, on the internet than any other. To the point that if you don't know how to search in English and read in English, you're at a serious information disadvantage. This is why for software developers, where information is king, English is the lingua franca.
Look at us, here we are people from all over the world, and we're all communicating in English because it's the common denominator.
It has little to do with the relative economic power of England and America at this point. In terms this group will relate to - English has stronger network effects going for it than any other language - and I expect its importance to only increase going forward.
https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/d...
It is really interesting to read about how languages outlast their cultures. Latin comes to mind of course, but as the book discusses this was also the case with Sumerian and others.
What an awkward way to end the article. What does he mean? Is he telling us his opinion of the language with one word, "great"?
Perhaps as an afterthought he added that line in case anyone wondered whether he thought the language was "great" or "not great", so he's kindly cleared up any confusion about that!
