Will English language domination ever end?

Deepak

B3D Yoddha
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Since ancient times, many languages dominated different parts of the world but none did like English has done. Do you guys see English domination getting diminished as power shifts from western nations to Asia gradually, will English ever lose its global status?
 
The comparison with old times doesnt really work as obviously today its alot easier to get to other places. Though I think the Spanish in ancient times spread their language alot more than the english did. Actually, even today there are more people speaking spanish than there are speaking english. English is only the 4th language in the world so I wouldnt even call english the dominating language of the world to begin with. If there is 1 biggest language in the world it should be spanish. Not counting madarin and hindi because they are focussed mainly in one country contrary to spanish and english.

English is probably one seen as the #1 language if you do alot of tech talk and/or are from the west.

As far as the shifting of languages, I dont know. I really think it depends on where you are from. For example in Holland you have to learn english, french and german and most people here speak, apart from our accent, pretty decent english, atleast as far as making yourself understandable goes. But for example most people from france and spain I met speak crap english or non at all. There arnt alot of countries in the world that teach a second language like english that well.

I dont think a language like mandarin will be traded for english soon. The main problem is that mandarin would be very hard to learn for most people. In term of complication its at the same level of Dutch and alot of people have trouble learning our language not the mention our grammer which is a total nightmare (even if you are dutch). And mandarin would even be extra hard as its sound is so different from what you are used to in the western world.

If there is a asian language that would be relative easy for most western people to learn it probably would be Japanese as its a pretty basic language compared to mandarin and dutch. But as there are only 130million speaking Japanese, all of which live in japan its not very usefull to learn that to so many people (even though I decided to sign myself up for fulltime Japanese language study next year...)

So yeah we will probably stick with english for some time. Especially as it seems that China is hammering on getting their people to speak decent english.
 
Of course, if there's some global catastrophe, such as some meteors decided to make earth their new home. A new civilization emerges from the ashes will likely have their own dominant language.

What's more interesting is, if there's no such global catastrophe, what will happen to English language? As we all know, languages do change over time. Modern English is quite different from Old English, which is incomprehensible to most English speakers. However, as English literatures are spreading at a global rate, will it become a damper which slows the rate of change? Will English splits into a "literary English" and a "vernacular English"?

Another possibility is, if a non-English-speaking country becomes so dominant that all new important information are now written in this language, and of course all older informations have been translated, then it's possible that this language may become a new dominant language. However, it seems quite unlikely for current world to have such a new domination. To make this happen, you'd need a country much more powerful than current superpower (the USA). Otherwise, people in other countries may prefer to continue using the old dominant language.

Another even more remote possibility is, maybe some day machine assisted translation will become so powerful that no one will ever need to put much effort to learn another language. Then there will be no longer a dominant language.
 
Since ancient times, many languages dominated different parts of the world but none did like English has done. Do you guys see English domination getting diminished as power shifts from western nations to Asia gradually, will English ever lose its global status?

No.
 
Actually, even today there are more people speaking spanish than there are speaking english. English is only the 4th language in the world so I wouldnt even call english the dominating language of the world to begin with. If there is 1 biggest language in the world it should be spanish.

The lead of Spanish over English in native speaking people is quite small. However, English totally dominates as a second language. This is where the English domination comes from. There are probably more people in the world that understand English than even Mandarin. I don't forsee English domination to lessen, especially not considering that it's a relatively simple language to learn. I expect English to take a lot of influence from other languages though. Ultimately in a few hundred years I wouldn't be surprised if we had a global language that was pretty much a very bastardized version of today's English.
 
The lead of Spanish over English in native speaking people is quite small. However, English totally dominates as a second language. This is where the English domination comes from. There are probably more people in the world that understand English than even Mandarin. I don't forsee English domination to lessen, especially not considering that it's a relatively simple language to learn. I expect English to take a lot of influence from other languages though. Ultimately in a few hundred years I wouldn't be surprised if we had a global language that was pretty much a very bastardized version of today's English.

I'm all for that :)

I actually don't speak many other languages well, a bit of spanish, a bit of french.
 
I dont think a language like mandarin will be traded for english soon. The main problem is that mandarin would be very hard to learn for most people. In term of complication its at the same level of Dutch and alot of people have trouble learning our language not the mention our grammer which is a total nightmare (even if you are dutch). And mandarin would even be extra hard as its sound is so different from what you are used to in the western world.

If there is a asian language that would be relative easy for most western people to learn it probably would be Japanese as its a pretty basic language compared to mandarin and dutch. But as there are only 130million speaking Japanese, all of which live in japan its not very usefull to learn that to so many people (even though I decided to sign myself up for fulltime Japanese language study next year...)

Everybody always thinks that their language is somehow miraculously hard for others to learn...:rolleyes:

Well I'm not going to be an exception. I'm sure dutch is a joke compared to learning finnish.
:smile:
 
Will English language domination ever end?

1. When the Chinese takes over or merge with the USA (and formed the Alliance), or
2. When some alien civilization takes over
 
Everybody always thinks that their language is somehow miraculously hard for others to learn...:rolleyes:

Well I'm not going to be an exception. I'm sure dutch is a joke compared to learning finnish.
:smile:

Im sure finnish is hard to, I never can make anything out of it when I hear it :D But its not a assumption, its a fact Dutch language isnt exactly the easiest thing to learn, especially our grammer.

Unless Hollywood gets totally owned by Bollywood, no.



Yes.

Exhibit A: Jari Litmanen. Dutch is so easy compared to finnish that even a professional athlete can learn it. :)


One thing that should be noted though that most Dutch soccer clubs force their foreign players to take languages lesson's. So its not they come here and after 2 years or so they suddenly magically speak Dutch just by walking around here, there is time and effort spend into making that possible.
 
IMO Dutch is one sexy language.
But no, I don't think English will stop being the dominant language. It is easy to pick up and since there are already so many dialects, nobody cares if your English is Engrish, Hingrish, Polgrish or whatever. It's not so with e.g. Polish where people are discriminated if their Polish is not spot-on.
 
Well, English is currently the "lingua franca", but many languages have had that status in the past. There's no reason to believe that it will stick this time. Now, it will probably take the fall of the US as a world power for that to happen, but it is entirely possible that English will no longer be the lingua franca at some time in the future.

What could be? I don't know. Though their economic power is growing at an amazing rate, I can't imagine Chinese (Mandarin or Cantonese) becoming the lingua franca, for the simple reason that it's a tonal language and has perhaps the most difficult writing system in the world. But, if China's economy and culture gets to the point where they totally dominate the rest of the world, it'll still happen.

The only way around this would be for us to form a stable world government while English is still the lingua franca, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
 
"considering that it's a relatively simple language to learn"

Is that true? I've always heard English was a particularly hard language to learn for foreigners. I don't remember learning it perse, as I was pretty young (its still my second language) but I do remember going crazy over the grammar.

At least contrasted with say a langauge like Spanish, which is learnable in like a month.
 
Pronunciation is the hard part but that's true to some extent with any language. For example I find it difficult to deliver three distinct pronunciations for "three" "tree" and "free" - "th" is problematic as it always goes towards "t" or "f" so I end up having two of them sound the same. But that still doesn't prevent me from being understood as per what I've said before.
 
"considering that it's a relatively simple language to learn"

Is that true? I've always heard English was a particularly hard language to learn for foreigners. I don't remember learning it perse, as I was pretty young (its still my second language) but I do remember going crazy over the grammar.

At least contrasted with say a langauge like Spanish, which is learnable in like a month.

English is easy to learn to a degree of proficiency that's good enough to communicate effectively. That's why it's perceived as an "easy" language to learn. After that, the learning curve gets steeper - English does have it's eccentricities. It's a language rich in idioms, slangs, reduced forms etc. and spelling/pronounciation can be a bitch (I've never heard of a German or Latin "spelling bee"). Other languages seem to be more "front-loaded" when it comes to learning.

English grammar is comparably simple. I mean, what's there to know? Backshift of tenses is something I struggled with when I learned English back in school but, in reality, even most native speakers don't give a shit about it - there seems to be a general trend in a lot of languages (German included) to flatten the structure of tenses and roll up all past tenses into the present perfect tense in colloquial usage.

English is easy to learn because:

  • Sentence structure follows the standard subject-verb-object order comparably strictly - it has to because nouns and articles are not declined and that simplifies things greatly.
  • Statements of place and time in English sentence syntax are usually located at the beginning of the sentence of the end of the sentence. In German, for exmaple, they can be woven into the sentence structure pretty much wherever the fuck you want.
  • Capitalization is simple and straight forward.
  • there are basically no noun and adjective inflections (i.e. case and gender) and comparably few verb inflections (only like 7 or so)
  • no noun compounds
  • no annoyances like seperable prefixes
  • nominal modifiers are usually short in English while in German you can chain attributes like there's no tomorrow
  • few personal pronouns
  • few irregular verbs
  • it's simple to form plurals in English (-s or -es), there are only few irregular plurals. In German, you have like a dozen regular ways to form plurals and you have to learn which one applies to each noun and that's just one of the reasons why I would rather take a gun to my head than learn that language as a foreign language

English has very few rules and you can ignore a good number of them. That might make it technically "wrong" but you can still have a proper conversation. I mean, somehow all the "Elizabeths" (heh) working at customer service call-centers in India can make themselves understood with an often very weak command of the English language. Oh, and after hearing a Latino, who has been living in the USA for more than 10 years, speak "English" I will punch everyone on the balls who ridicules Germans for not pronouncing th and v properly.
 
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