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What Language Will the World Speak In 2115?
An anonymous reader writes: Throughout human history, different languages have emerged and died, waxed and waned in relative importance, evolved, and spread to new locales. An article in the Wall Street Journal considers what languages the world will speak a hundred years from now. Quoting: "Science fiction often presents us with whole planets that speak a single language, but that fantasy seems more menacing here in real life on this planet we call home—that is, in a world where some worry that English might eradicate every other language. That humans can express themselves in several thousand languages is a delight in countless ways; few would welcome the loss of this variety.
Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world's language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons. ... Yet more to the point, by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today's 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it."
Some may protest that it is not English but Mandarin Chinese that will eventually become the world's language, because of the size of the Chinese population and the increasing economic might of their nation. But that's unlikely. For one, English happens to have gotten there first. It is now so deeply entrenched in print, education and media that switching to anything else would entail an enormous effort. We retain the QWERTY keyboard and AC current for similar reasons. ... Yet more to the point, by 2115, it's possible that only about 600 languages will be left on the planet as opposed to today's 6,000. Japanese will be fine, but languages spoken by smaller groups will have a hard time of it."
The phrase "We retain ... AC current for similar reasons." makes me believe the author doesn't know what (s)he is speaking about.
I personally see no reason why a single language, and particularly English, SHOULDN'T replace other languages eventually. Language barriers continue to be one of the causes of cultural conflict and the existence of many different languages, be it 6000 or 600 or even 6 serves absolutely no practical purpose other than as artificial barriers to communication. If a culture or place wishes to preserve its traditional/ancestral language for ritualistic or ceremonial purposes then so be it, but the official language of every country should absolutely be the same and every person on this planet would benefit from being able to understand every other person. There is simply no good argument against that. I personally hope that it takes less than 100 years to shrink the number of existent dialects, particularly those used by very few people for the purpose of maintaining some artificial sense of cultural independence. You do not have to speak a different language to preserve that different culture; it is only one part of the concept, and not necessarily an essential one.
Imagine an America where even the immigrants spoke fluent English... I know we'll never reach utopia, but I believe that would be a step in the right direction. I personally believe English is a perfectly acceptable candidate for the universal language because, quite frankly, it already is. Most other countries teach it in their school systems to the same degree they teach math and science, unlike in the US where schools offer some arbitrary European languages up to what generally amounts to an intermediate level of mastery. English is the language in which your ideas are most likely to be read and understood.
Cultural unification must eventually occur anyway. Stop fearing the future.
English is doing fine. I don't see it fading away so quickly.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I often wonder how realistic that possibility really is. Lots of Chinese people learn English, but very few English speakers learn Chinese. That has led to a one-way lingual exchange exporting English to China.
But to create a Chinglish-style creole in the future, the lingual export would need to be bidirectional. English speakers would need to be learning Chinese at at least a comparable rate that Chinese speakers are learning English.
One could argue that with China's increasing economic prominence that it may some day be necessary for non-Chinese people to learn Chinese, but even as the #2 superpower that still has yet to happen.
As such, I'd wager that English as it currently exists will continue to dominate in 100 years. The fact that it's the first language of several major countries and virtually everyone worldwide learns English as a second language is a trend that shows no signs of stopping.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
English has one thing going for it: despite its odd irregularities, it is pretty easy to learn. Chinese on the other hand is notoriously hard to read, write and speak well. I don't think many people will bother to learn Chinese as a second language. Remember when Japan was the up and coming economic powerhouse of the world? We'd all have to learn Japanese... Except that hasn't hapoened either.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I see plenty of English speakers learning Chinese. A lot of them never learn "proper" English. But I work in San Francisco with the children of Chinese immigrants. Even the elected mayor is a child of Chinese immigrants, now.
Going back to the OP, the current entrenchment is no guarantee. 100 years ago, everybody who wanted to do science learned German. 300 years ago, everybody learned French. 600 years ago, everybody in the West learned Latin. 2000 years ago, everybody in the Mediterranean learned Greek. For most of that time, everybody in China learned Chinese.
Have a nice time.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
What about universal translators? In 100 years time, won't they be good enough for general use? :)
-> my bet is that the world will still speak lots of languages and use translators.
Thank you! (check my sig). It's bugged me for no small amount of time.
Unicode support is one of those things that to most Americans is an "Oh, I guess that matters to some people, doesn't it?" afterthought, but to people who use alternative character sets it's one big mess of poor support after the next.
You all realize that in many cases by not properly supporting unicode you *force* people to use English, right? In this context I'm not talking about Slashdot persay (this is an English-language website and that's fine), but all sorts of other things. For example, in programming, most languages simply don't allow me to use Icelandic characters in variable and function names. So I'm left with two choices: mangle them (like we have to do with URLs and a ton of other things), or simply use English. If I choose to mangle them to remove Icelandic characters, not only is it ugly and less readable (imagine if you had to mangle about a third of the letters in the English alphabet to write), but it almost guarantees messups because you write your *strings* unmangled (you certainly don't want to be outputting mangled text to the user), so you're always switching back and forth between needing to write mangled and unmangled. Even as for the strings themselves, in most languages unicode support ranges from "mildly acceptable" to "bloody awful". Because it's just an afterthought to developers whose native language is English that hardly crosses their mind in the design and implementation phases. They know that they "should" support it, but most really don't care.
Now, I've seen some people take the concept too far, like trying to localize "for" and "if" and "else" and the like. That's stupid and pointless and asking for problems. But for crying out loud, make my strings work right and let me chose my own variable / function names. :P
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
I don't know. Not long ago the Boston accent was fairly prevelant through Boston suburbs, but now most kids sound like they're from California. There is a trend towards homogenization, and I don't think the desire for locals to distinguish themselves will be expressed through dialect. It's too hard with media so prevelant, and that's not gonna change.
Or, as we call the language made from a mish mash of existing languages today: English.
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The key point about English is that, while it's not the easiest language to learn to speak well, it is one of the easiest to learn to speak badly but comprehensibly. People can speak English really badly and still make themselves understood. This gives it a nice incremental learning curve where the result of a small bit of effort is worthwhile.
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Most of those words use latin or greek root, prefixes and suffixes. It is not surprising that those words are used almost unchanged in French since this is a latin language. Generally speaking, French and English are very close. They have been sharing a lot of words since centuries.
Islandic is probably very different because of the lack of latin or greek references. For example, a french speaker will immediately associate the greek prefix 'hippo' to horses (as in Hippodrome, Hippopotame, ...). I do not speek Islandic but I suspect that this is not the case in that language so it make more sense to invent new words in islandic.
At least 500 million people know the term 'People Mountain People Sea'
All the four words that made up that term English words, and yet, native English people may be scratching their heads thinking 'what the hell is that ?'
Things like that is happening, not only inside China, but all over the world ... Chinese people are 'borrowing' English words to spice up their communications
And the interesting thing is, the use of English words by the Chinese is by no mean a zero-sum game. The Chinese are not giving up their own Chinese language. The English language to them is yet-another-tool that they can use to talk to others
If a language grows to be dominate most likely it won't be one we currently have, more likely it will be a mish mash of existing languages, similar to what English has become.
"English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.”
This,
English will remain the dominant language because it is so versatile and malleable. You can mess up the sentence structure to hell and back and you can still understand it (I.E Chinglish, Indian English and so forth... Thanking you very much sir for the reading of my post), you can use the wrong word entirely and still make sense. We can borrow the mannerisms and even structure of other languages and still be understandable. Also unlike other languages, in particular Asian languages English is very imprecise, meaning it can handle being spoken incorrectly, if you look at Thai for example, the word "mai" has five meanings depending on which tone it's spoken in (high, mid, low, rising and falling), Strict language requirements tend to limit its spread. China has been a dominant force in Asia for some time yet Chinese isn't a dominant language because English is much easier to learn and communicate with.
That being said, it wont be the same English we speak today because English is a living language and will change with time. Think about how different the language was back in the 80's if you're old enough, pretty rad huh.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
100 years isn't so interesting, maybe after a 1000 years.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other. Even today, try getting a Brit and a Texan into the same room and see if they can communicate. English will just become the root for a bunch of new languages, like Latin was the basis for the Romance languages.
Perhaps there was some convergence during the brief period of broadcast media over the last century, but even that is fragmenting into smaller groups as people tune in to more localized youtube channels... you won't have everyone tuning into a single "impartial" news source anymore with anchors with relatively neutral accents from the midwest.
People like using language to separate themselves from each other.
Keep in mind that English accents in actual Britain are already more diverse then several language groups. In fact one of them has been promoted a language. When my grandmother grew up in Arbroath in the 20s and 30s everyone in the County spoke English with a pronounced Scots accent. Now they speak the Scots language.
If you add in the rest of the empire you get accents so strong they could easily be languages in their own right -- such as Singlish and Hinglish -- and people who simply speak with such a strong local accent they are difficult to understand (even Indians speaking English proper tend to have a very strong accent to American and British ears, because they learn it to talk the each-other not you, white boy).
But there's still a huge amount of people who can speak English with a small enough accent that you will be able to understand them. What's goi9ng on is there's an international English accent, which you can hear most easily if you talk to a Swede or Norwegian, and is somewhere between Britain's RP and the Midwest/California accent American newscasters use.
So I suspect that's what'll happen in the future. It'll be like Latin in 700-1800, There'll be dozens of distinct dialects on their way to becoming languages spoken by people who don't want to be particularly important, but anyone who does want to be important will learn the Standard Accent so he can talk to foreigners.
... "Firefly"; watch and learn.
The reason that languages fragmented in the past was that populations were fragmented and rarely communicated. That is not the case today. Increasingly concentrated mass media in English will cause accents and dialects of English to converge. Mind you, the root English will also evolve over hundreds and thousands of years, but eventually, everyone will speak this root English.