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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."
Go to the hippest clubs or most-expensive shopping malls in Shanghai or Hong Kong. You'll see elite Chinese and HK kids speaking English, not Chinese. More often than not, they're speaking English with an English accent too.
You don't see elite Western kids in New York or London hanging out and speaking Chinese.
The same goes for rich kids in Rio and Sao Paulo. The same goes for rich kids in Bangkok, Istanbul, Mexico City and Riyadh. The global elite speak English. They're not going to be learning Chinese any time soon.
(The exception is Japan, of course. But Japan is Japan. They're not going to be speaking English any time soon, elite or not).
The issue isn't population numbers. It's what the global 1% are doing. And they're learning English in increasing numbers.
Being able to understand other cultures to form my own opinions would be great! These awful language barriers feed all manner of stupidity (e.g. wars, distrust, etc.). As for culture transfer? Pshh, whatever man, we have art and poetry for that stuff. We shouldn't mourn progress on that account.
First of all do not confuse language and dialects. People around here speak Basque, one of those tiny languages which are gong to disappear according to some. But young people here are becoming more and more interested by their cultural heritage and more and more are learning Basque. That is because there is a unification of the several Basque dialects into a single language understood and spoken by all. Dialects have disappeared or are disappearing but the language is reinforced
English is my mother tongue but where I live I had to learn another language, French, in which I am fully bilingual. Right now I am learning Spanish because I live 11 km from the border and it is quite handy. My girlfriend speaks French, Spanish and Basque and has decided to learn some English. Many Europeans speak several languages and it doesn't seem to be an issue for them.
realkiwi
Mandarin as a language is not that hard to learn. It's fairly regular and very analytic (almost no word changes), even tones are not that hard to get right after you practice a little. I was able to pick up enough of Mandarin from my girlfriend in several months to be able to ask for directions in China.
However, _written_ Chinese is unlearnable. Simply forget about it. You really need to memorize thousands of symbols just to be able to read an everyday newspaper. Writing is just as hard - imaging having to learn several completely new scripts (Russian, Greek aaand Arabic) at the same time.
Phonetic spelling using one of many Romanization schemes is also problematic because Chinese is very homophonic - lots of words sound exactly the same.
By then English shall have fragmented into a bunch of different dialects, quite distinguishable from each other.
I predict the opposite: because of globalization, there will mostly be only one way to pronounce English, with accents having become a rarity.
If what you write were true, it would have happened a very long time ago.
But it didn't. Why?
Because a language is basically like a uniform that marks "us" vs. "them". It creates group cohesion and community.
To be exact any non-English language, because English is spoken by anybody anyway, therefore does not give any identity.
English-speakers everywhere (be it a native US or a cosmopolitan European or Chinese) are having very few children and are living in a destructive "pop culture" that is not very conducive for large families.
Non-English-speakers on the other hand are isolated from "pop culture" a lot better, therefore can have more stable and larger families - and are growing in all countries.
That trend can be seen everywhere. Traditional English speakers will be a minority in all the major English-speaking nations (US, UK, Australia). Maybe they can hold out and maintain a majority in New Zealand.
A good example are the Amish: Just 200 Swiss/Germans came to America and they did NOT assimilate. 200 years later they are 250,000 and still doubling every generation. That is only possible because they are isolated from the majority culture - and their ancient German dialect is one of the things that helps them do that: If the children don't understand Lady Gaga, they won't be influenced by her.
And that is the reason why no language replaced all the others: When the dominant culture/language becomes decadent, people have no other choice than to push other cultures/languages in order to survive.
Uhm, I'm a non-native English speaker. I'd say that learning that the word order in English sentences is meaningful is one of the stumbling blocks but not even the most painful one. My native language is Russian and the word order is not fixed there, so Yoda sentences like: "When nine hundred years old you reach, look as good you will not" are often completely normal for Russian speakers.
For me the most complicated part of English is. its pronunciation. And also maybe its grammar tenses (Russian has no direct equivalent of present perfect and future-in-the-past).
Some accents / dialects have been growing: e.g. Cockney English rhyming. As a result of it becoming 'popular', actual Cockneys have doubled down and made it harder.
Accents / dialects are "membership" indicators, showing you belong to a community; they take time to learn. There is value in (1) having a common language but also for a community (2) being distinct. I suspect that _bilingualism_ is not going to fade away, though having one common language (English by default) will stay.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
I don't know much about the Chinese language, but I've learned a bit about Japanese writing, which is derived from it.
For Japanese, there's a distinct set of symbols that are entirely phonetic, called kana, which is divided into two systems. Hirigana is used for learning pronounciation of the imported Chinese characters (called kanji), while katakana is used for foreign words and names. In literature meant for children, you'll see small hirigana symbols above the kanji characters. I presume that once they know the pronunciation, the kids can pick up the meaning by context. Even though there are 80,000+ kanji, Japanese apparently only teach the most common ~2000 in school. No one but scholars and specialists know more than that.
I have no idea how the Chinese learn their hanzi characters though. A quick search indicates the answer is probably a crapload of study and rote memorization.
In answer to your question about the dictionary - I believe they're ordered by the number of brush strokes in the character.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Chinese characters aren't that hard to learn. I learnt them (a subset anyway) while learning Japanese. It took about 3 years of reasonably intense study to be able to pick up and read a novel without too much difficulty. After 2 years I could generally approach newspaper articles. Newspapers are generally one of the easiest written mediums to approach. While there are several thousand characters in use, there is a relatively small subset of frequently used characters. Additional most characters are formed in a regular fashion from simpler characters. Probably the most common form being one phonetic part to indicate the reading and one semantic part to indicate the meaning.
Chinese (apparently) has more characters in common use than Japanese but the difficulty does not scale linearly with the number of characters and Japanese adds the significant complication of having phonetic (Chinese derived) readings and often multiple, irregular native Japanese readings per character, and huge numbers of irregular readings for combinations of characters.
One interesting side affect of characters having semantic meaning is that it often makes the meaning of words even new to the reader, immediately obvious. Especially for science and technology related vocabulary the meanings of words rendered in Chinese characters is often much clearer and more immediately obvious than that of English words derived from Latin/Greek. As an extreme example I can often comprehend Chinese (esp. when written in traditional characters) even though I do not speak Chinese
French has a reputation for linguistic preservation efforts, but it doesn't really seem to take. Television is télévision. Telephone is téléphone. Electricity is électricité. Etc. You know what these words are in Icelandic? Sjónvarp, sími, and rafmagn . Go to Wikipedia and look up random modern technical words from different fields (ideally ones not named after a person, since that's cheating) and browse over the language bar on the left to see what they're called in French vs. Icelandic (or any other languages). For example, photon, integral, mitochondria, polymer, autism, transistor, seismograph, hippocampus, supernova, and tyrannosaurus, to pick some. According to Wikipedia, in French they're photon, intégral, mitochondrie, polymère, autisme, transistor, sismographe, hippocampe, supernova, and tyrannosaurus. In Icelandic they're ljóseind, heildun, hvatberi, fjölliða, einhverfa, smári, jarðskjálftamælir, dreki, sprengistjarna and grameðla, respectively.
Why does French have this reputation for protecting their language so much? It sure doesn't look that way. Maybe the difference is with common words? For example, Icelandic has a problem with people using English as slang in everyday speech. For example, "hæ" and "bæ" as casual greetings ("hi", "bye") are so common that they're pretty much embedded into the language. Does French do this sort of thing too? Maybe they're better about that. But at least in terms of new words coming into the language, I just don't see where they get this reputation from.
(It should be noted that not only does Icelandic come up with native-based words for technical terms, but we actually use them. We actually say "tölva", not computer, "sjónvarp", not TV, "rafmagn", not electricity, etc. If there's a technical term that a person doesn't know the proper Icelandic for then they use the English, but in maybe 90% of cases, once the proper Icelandic for a word becomes widely known, it actually gets used) (there are of course those 10% exceptions where nobody liked the proper term so most people don't use it, of course... ;) Pizza / flatbaka being a good example)
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
You miss the fact that english has a lot of french / latin rooted words.
So your complaint about telephone, television and electricity makes no sense at all as it is the opposite way around: the english use the same word as the french here.
Same for the other examples you picked, either they are so scientific, like hippocampus, that it is hard to figure who adapted whom, I would say both languages simply adapted the latin "medical" form, or they are obviously the same in both languages.
Why does French have this reputation for protecting their language so much? It sure doesn't look that way. First as mentioned above, you look at it from the wrong angle (by picking bad examples, french words that got adopted by english ;D ). And secondly, french is not spoken by many on the planet. So why should they not protect their language? The Icelanders do the same if you have not noticed yet ...
Computer in french is "Calculateur" btw.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes. French was the international language 100 years ago. English was (at that point) an also-ran.
Interesting observation: in modern-day Poland, when you ride the train, there are multi-lingual signs instructing on how do do things like open the windows or operate the toilet. The signs appear in Polish (it's Poland, after all), German (much of Poland was Germany and vice versa), Russian (it was under the Soviet sphere of influence), and French (the international language). No English.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
[Citation needed]
Or if you didn't travel, you'd never know that other people talk funny.
You've actually done a longitudinal study, have you? I'd like to read it, where is it published?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The differences in English between areas over the last century has become more pronounced not less.
No, I have to agree with the claim that English has gotten very homogenized. Lot of interesting dialects in US and England have near vanished. For example, cockney is not a dialect, but hundreds or thousands of dialects, most which aren't spoken any more. The US dialects just aren't as strong and weird as they used to be. And I bet your wife would have even more trouble with Australian dialects a century ago.
That argument doesn't fly in face of the fact that it still goes on like that to this day here in Iceland, and we're not at all isolated. It's not like in 1850 there were people coining words for smartphone (snjallsími), tablet computer (spjaldtölva), coelecanth (bláfiskur), muon (mýeind), hybrid car (tvinbíll), etc, etc. This is not some old phenomenon, it's actively occurring to this day. Tablets are a great example because that was a really recent thing, when they first came out stores were selling them as "tablets", but once the word spjaldtölva started to hit the public sphere, there was a large-scale shift, and now all of the stores sell them as spjaldtölvur. Probably 90% of new things** that become popular eventually follow that pattern. Not 100%, and it's not an instant shift, but a large majority get there eventually.
And again, I'm not faulting French for taking English words straight out or English for taking French words straight out or anything of the sort. That's actually the most common thing to do. I'm simply pointing out that the reputation of French for "coining their own words rather than adopting international terms" doesn't even remotely seem to pass muster. If someone in another country invents or discovers something, it seems that almost always the French name for it is just a pronunciation-and-spelling-adjusted version of the international name. That's hardly "preserving the language", at least compared to what happens here with new words.
** The big exception nowadays, and the one that's causing a lot of concern with lingustic traditionalists, are *software* terms, things like, for example, what you may see in your menubar. Relatively few apps have Icelandic support. Heck, people even say "CVS" as "See-Vee-Ess" rather than "Seh-Vaff-Ess", they pronounce the letters as they're pronounced in English. Where this will all lead, I don't know....
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
The French are so stuck up about their language. Anywhere else that you saw the word "Language Police" it would be someone making a jab at another person for being an over-the-top pedant, and it would be derisive. But the French actually are unable to see the irony in actually creating such a department. The fact that they would go and harass a restaurant owner in the 90% English speaking part of town for having English signs...Well, it really just reminds me of the TSA and the Police State that the Americas in general are becoming.
Did you know that the official language for Air Traffic Control is English? In Germany, all communications are in English, even if the pilots are German. In Italy, all communications are in English, even if the pilots are Italian. In China all communications are in English, even if the pilots are Chinese. In North Korea, all communications are in English, even if the pilots are Korean. In France, all communications are in English, unless the pilots are French. Then the communications are in French.
Given that there are lots of planes on the same frequency, you might expect that it would be much more useful, and indeed far safer, for all communications to be in a unified language. And you would be correct. however, there is one country where pride of language is more important than the lives of tens of millions of people.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Doubtful. English has barely changed at all in the last 100 years, even though the world has changed immensely since WWI. Any literate English speaker can pick up an English-language book from the early 1900s and read it with very little difficulty. In that time, we've gone from the British Empire never having the sun set on it, to going through two world wars, a cold war, the British Empire completely falling apart, the USA turning from a mostly agrarian nation into the world's largest superpower and a huge industrial and technological economy. Despite all that change in the two major English-speaking nations, the language hasn't changed much at all.
Remember, we're talking about what languages we'll speak in 100 years, not 500 or 1000.