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?
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.
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...)
I'm sure dutch is a joke compared to learning finnish.
:smile:
I sure hope so, I'm hopelessly mono-linguistic!Will English language domination ever end?
I sure hope so, I'm hopelessly mono-linguistic!
Everybody always thinks that their language is somehow miraculously hard for others to learn...
Well I'm not going to be an exception. I'm sure dutch is a joke compared to learning finnish.
:smile:
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.
"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.