by msangi on 4/5/18, 7:25 PM with 149 comments
by diego_moita on 4/6/18, 3:03 PM
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.
by adrianN on 4/6/18, 5:18 AM
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.
by Viliam1234 on 4/6/18, 6:29 AM
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.
by eloff on 4/6/18, 4:47 PM
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.
by pimmen on 4/6/18, 3:22 PM
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.
by cobbzilla on 4/6/18, 5:21 AM
by realusername on 4/6/18, 5:08 AM
by pretendscholar on 4/6/18, 5:21 AM
by 100k on 4/6/18, 5:17 AM
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.
by bartart on 4/6/18, 5:17 AM
by exodust on 4/6/18, 4:40 PM
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!
by oceanman888 on 4/6/18, 5:39 AM
by mistrial9 on 4/6/18, 4:35 PM
by zwieback on 4/6/18, 3:14 PM
by tomcooks on 4/6/18, 2:19 PM
Hopefully peak English has been reached.