Any language will rival English as the world lingua franca within the next 50 years

[Snow Lau]

Hello everyone,
Can you share your ideas with me?
What do you think "English in the future"? Will Chinese rival English as the world lingua franca within the next 50 years? Why?

Thank you!!

[Tdol]

I don't think that Chinese will rival English in the next 50 years. Numbers of native speakers are pretty irrelevant to international language. The boom in the Chinese economy doesn't affect this greatly either- it may be useful to speak Chinese to do business in China, but Japan is the second largest economy in the world and Japanese never emerged as an international language. Therefore, I believe that the economic progress of China and the numbers of Chinese are actually irrelevant when thinking about the language a Brazilian doctor will use when talking with a Vietnamese colleague at a meeting in Canada.

The internet is mostly in English, the language of intenational trade is English. Europe has learned English, so too has much of Asia. Billions of dollars have been spent on training people to speak English. Chinese cannot challenge this international status. I hvae seen arguments that the growth of the Chinese economy will change things, but I think they are wishful thinking- why should a Saudi businessman or woman suddenly decide to learn Chinese in order to fly to Finland to buy mobile phones?
English is an enormously flexible language and the emergence of international forms will change the language greatly, maybe even make it unrecognisable, but no other language will replace it in the next fifty years, IMO.

[twostep]

Tdol when was your last trip to the US? Every bank, commercial, voice mail system, instruction manual, job application - has two languages Engish and Spanish.

[Tdol]

The question's about Chinese. Spanish is a far more credible candidate than Chinese, but even Spanish has little chance of replacing English in the next 50 years.

[twostep]

That is what they should have said when I struggled with (now long forgotten) French.

[Tdol]

I'm limping badly in my progress with Japanese.

[twostep]

Originally Posted by tdol

I'm limping badly in my progress with Japanese.

Try crutches

On a more serious level - I am looking for crutches. Have you come across a website, a book, anything at all pertaining to simultan translation symbols? I had something pretty close to competition level shorthand symbols.

[dr_linguista]

Maybe not within the coming 50 years. It could be within the coming 100 years!

I guess Spanish and Japanese might rival English in the coming decades. However, IMO, Spanish will more likely spread increasingly before Japanese, because it's a bit close to English spellings and somehow sounds.

And maybe until the time Japanese reaches that level of similarity with English- or Spanish after ten decades- it could overtake the world...

[Tdol]

I don't see Japanese emerging as a world language depsite Japan's economic power. It has been a major economic power for a long time now and even when Toyota emerges as the number one car manufacturer, I don't think much will change. Spanish is a major international langauge and growing in popularity, but there has been far to much invested in education for people to suddenly change horses and change to Spanish. In the EU, for instance, there's no chance of Spanish becoming the first choice language. Spanish is merging in the States, but that is only through immigration.

[RonBee]

I am trying to learn Spanish, but the progress is slow. (There are a great many immigrants from Latin America living in the Charlotte area, especially from Mexico and Honduras.)