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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."
Cardassian of course
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Meanwhile, /. will still not support Unicode characters outside of a very small whitelist. Historians look upon this as a major factor in why Chinese did not become the dominant world language during the 21st century.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The phrase "We retain ... AC current for similar reasons." makes me believe the author doesn't know what (s)he is speaking about.
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.
In only 100 years' time? Nothing much will change, is my guess. Historically, we have seen that Latin(-ish) became dominant in much of Europe, then faded away again with the fading influence of the Roman church, but it held out for a very long time in academic circles - in fact, as a little anecdote, when the Flora Europaea was published from the '60es onwards, there was a debate over whether it should be published in Latin or English, according to the foreword.
English will be the trade language for a long while, but Chinese will grow in influence, no doubt, and may well be the second language in most of Europe. As for language loss - there seems to be a pattern where smaller language groups diminish, but then go through a revival when the speakers become wealthy enough to take an interest in their own, unique identity. Dialects too don't always disappear quickly, so perhaps we won't lose too much.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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
For a given voltage and given mass of wire per unit distance, however, DC has lower losses (dramatically lower in some environments, such as undersea cables). It also is a lot more stable, you don't have to worry about frequency maintenance, off-sync grid interconnects, and a bunch of other stuff.
High voltage DC is still expensive to do but it's been getting a *lot* cheaper, and will probably continue to do so. For the time being, though, it's going to be confined to long high-power runs and undersea cables, situations that maximize its benefits and minimize the number of step-up / step-down stations required.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
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.
I'm afraid 100 years is rather short time for languages to develop. Let's compare 100 years backwards to today. Was the combo platter that much different in 1915?
2015 is only 100 years away, John Backus designed FORTRAN 57 years ago, so it is 1/3 of the way there and still going strong. I suspect that C will still be in use.
Oh, what do you mean spoken ?
Or, as we call the language made from a mish mash of existing languages today: English.
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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
The difference between English today and earlier examples like French, German, Latin, Arabic, Greek, Aramaic, etc., is the vast bulk of written material available in English, and increasingly audio and video digital formats, plus the fact that while English is as difficult as any other language to speak well, it is easier than most to speak, and especially to read, passably.
Technology for translation will make that reality less relevant but is unlikely to change the relative positions of the big languages. English, Mandarin, Spanish, and Russian will still have a lot of wealth associated with them.
It is a loss for the world because when a language becomes widespread, it loses a lot of its distinctiveness. English has the grammar that it does largely because the English language community went through several iterations of that process.
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.
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
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.
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.
"English becoming the defacto global lingua franca"
That sentence suggests why. The English language is proven very adapt at including words and phrases from a whole host of other Languages.
e.g
German: Blitz, Bratwurst, Delicatessen, Ersatz, Flak, Frankfurter, Larger, kaput, Muesli, Spritzer, Zeitgeist,
French: au-fait, belle, blase, brunette, cafe, critique, de-rigueur, deja-vue.
Spanish: Amigo, banana, barbecue, breeze, cannibal, cargo.
Japanese: Bonsai, haiku, karaoke, origami, manga, satsuma, tycoon.
Chinese: char, chow, Ketchup
I can see applications for DC power distribution in certain circumstances. High-density computing, for one - why have a full mains PSU in every server? It's expensive, more points of failure, and you end up going from mains incoming to DC for the UPSs inverted to AC to send back to the servers converted back to DC for use inside - and those inverters are not that reliable too. It makes more sense to feed all the servers off of DC (Usually 48V - any lower and current gets silly), and have the power supply stuff all centralized. All the servers need is a DC-DC converter for each rail.
Telcos have been doing exactly that for decades now: all their exchanges and much of the optical kit runs on -48V: it's a low enough voltage to be safe to work on when live (negative rather than positive because that protects against corrosion on the wires), easy to combine sources (a diode will do it), no need to "switch" to backup power (just connect your load, battery and source together, job done).
Facebook went the other way for a large server farm, though: running 480V 3-phase AC to the racks (277V per phase). Cleverly, though, they don't need to convert DC from the batteries to AC in power cuts: the mixed DC/AC bus feeds switch-mode power supplies which convert incoming power to DC anyway, so switching between AC utility power and DC battery power doesn't matter. Pretty clever really, IMO.
[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.
You don't get it. He is not saying that French is Latin or Greek but that French is derived from Latin (and indirectly from greek). French like Italian and Spanish, is basically Latin after 2000 years of evolution.
Even though most french would not be able to understand Latin (as an englishman would probably not be able to understand medieval english), they should be able to guess the meaning of plenty of Latin words because they have a lot in common.
German and several other languages such as english, allow to create new words by combining existing words from the same language. In English, 'hippopotamus' could have be named a "river horse" and later become a "riverhorse".
In french you can't really do that. A "cheval de rivière" cannot become a "chevalrivière" or a "chevalderivière".
However, since the tradition in the scientific and technical community is to create new words using Latin (and Greek), it is very common for some of those new words to be accepted very quickly in French regardless of the country they were created because they share a lot of similarities with existing french words.
The mistake you make is that Seismograph is not a Scottish word but a greek word invented by a Scot.
... "Firefly"; watch and learn.
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.
> 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?
France is one of the few languages that is controlled by an official organism: L'Académie Française defines the rules since 1635. In practice, that means that French has not changed a lot during the last 2 or 3 centuries (at least in France itself).
Texts from the French revolution (1789) still look very modern ( http://www.matierevolution.fr/... )
New words or rules are of course added every years by the Académie Francaise with more or less success (e.g. "courier" for "email")
Also, France is actively trying to protect the language by laws. For example, French radio stations have a limit to the amount of non-french speaking songs they can play. Some companies were also fined for providing english documents without a proper translation to some of their french employees.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
What's with all of this revisionist history? Seems like everyone is trying to take the opportunity to misattribute the coining of words to French. No, the French did not coin the word geography. The word geography was coined by the ancient greek philosopher Eratosthenes. The French took the word from the Latin geographia, who in turn took it from the Greek.
Why not just explain to me what the word "cat" means is while you're at it? I'm sure I know far more about the flow of languages in Europe than you do. Without looking it up: tell me, which major branch of proto-Germanic has no modern descendents? Which modern eastern European language is related to Finnish? Which modern western-European language is not descended from PIE? Which languages apart from classic Greek has it been suggested that ancient Macedonian was related to? I can keep going.
But they're not coining these words. They're just taking them. And they take them regardless of the origin. Robot has a slavic origin. French? "Robot" (Icelandic: vélmenni). Tsunami is Japanese. French? "Tsunami" (Icelandic: flóðbylgja). Opossom comes from freakin Algonquian, but even that hasn't gotten them to pick anything more French than "Opossum" (Icelandic: pokarotta). Even the "Latin and Greek still count even though neither are understandable in French and Greek isn't even related" excuse doesn't remotely stand up to scrutiny.
The simple fact is, French does very, very little to what it's stereotyped as doing (re-coining international terms into French), while there actually exist languages that *do* change international terms.
If you play a Ke$ha song backwards, you hear messages from Satan. Even worse, if you play it forwards you hear Ke$ha.
Others have examined slightly larger sample sizes.
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.
Quebec is a weird case.
KFC is KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken) in France.
KFC is PFK (Poulet Frite Kentucky) in Quebec.
Because laws.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
There's more French than German in the English language.
You are comparing apples with oranges. Our common, everyday words are far more like German than French: bruder=brother (vs. frere), Ich war = I was (vs. j'étais) etc. However our more complex words are largely from French e.g. economics=economiques (vs. Wirtschaft).
One of the things which makes French so much easier than German to speak for an Englishman is that if you don't know the word (which usually means rarer vocabulary) you can often get away by picking a suitable English word and saying it with a French pronunciation (it does not always work but it is worth a try). With German you cannot do that since the overlap is with the simple, everyday words that you learn when you learn the language. This makes it far harder to both speak and to understand since you have to relearn every word in German whereas with French not so much.
It's kinda cool that we can witness this process in real time, as populations in Singapore, India, etc. gradually adopt more English vocabulary, norms, and syntax. Singapore is a great example of this phenomenon... say a Cantonese-speaking guy marries a Malay-speaking girl. Neither one of them speaks "native" English; they both have an accent. But they also can't speak each others' native tongue. Their only shared language is "broken" English... and that's what their kids grow up with as their native language.
Living in Taiwan all these years, I find myself confronted with a host of different accents and dialects that I would never have encountered back home in Iowa. I've heard all manner of "English" from Kiwis, Ozzies, Scousers, Paddies, etc... not to mention folks from other language families altogether.
Even as the old divisions fade away, you can see the new divisions emerge...
To quote Mr. Spock... Fascinating!
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The trend toward homogenization is based on communication as well, and since the goal seems to be encouraging everyone, everywhere to be able to communicate with everyone else, everywhere else, that will only help make everyone sound more similar to each other than before.
In Europe, already a large portion of the population speaks English, technically as a second language, but almost as effectively as their first. Numerous European pop music groups have sung just about the entire body of their work in English even though they're not from English-speaking countries (ABBA, Aqua, Rednex, etc) and are most popular in countries that never were established by the British Empire.
French could have had this level of expansion, but French has been intentionally held back as language, new words are basically forbidden. This has meant that large combinations of words to describe new things have been necessary when English simply creates new words or appropriates words from other languages as needed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Yep, English is the Borg of languages. You will be assimilated. It actually works quite effectively.