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Will Spanish and Chinese overcome English?
Do you think in the near future English will be no more the language of the business worldwide?
Will English be somehow like today's French language is (A not useful language but with international presence).
Chinese has so much more native speakers than anyother language in the world and Spanish is the second most spoken language after English in the world.
>>Chinese has so much more native speakers than anyother language in the world and Spanish is the second most spoken language after English in the world.<<
The matter, though, is that in this sort of case number of total speakers, and even number of *non-native* speakers alone, is more important than number of native speakers alone, since the reason for the position of English today is not just how many native speakers it has, but rather its ability to act as a lingua franca on a global scale. While Mandarin may have the most native speakers of any language, this is inconsequential to its potential as acting as a lingua franca, especially since it does not have that many second-language speakers outside of China or other areas where Chinese languages happen to be spoken. Consequently, it cannot effectively challenge English as a global lingua franca despite its large numbers of native speakers.
MY OPINION:
In the next decade Chinese, will become the third or even second most important language.
China has a lot of potential in all sorts of aspects, from economy to fashion.
I am trueborn Chinese, and I speak Mandarin Chinese, I really thank your showing preference for Chinese, but actually frankly speaking, Chinese will NOT be able to overcome or replace English and French, it's absolutely impossible. Although Mandarin is widely spoken by almost 85% of China's Population, (about 1000,000,000 people, the rest of small quantity of people speak Cantonese or Minnanese & etc.), but It's really a pity that Chinese language is only spoken by China's Mainland, Hongkong, Taiwan, and Macao, and it's still much too difficult to be an official International language in the world, so I can affirm that Chinese will NOT rise too much.
In a word: NO. (I hope no, in particular for Chinese)
Although Chinese will grow in importance, I doubt that it will challenge English as a business language worldwide. For one thing, the writing system is extremely difficult to master, and the tone system is not too easy either. But the other reason is similar to why even German has problems: The Chinese are expending massive efforts to learn English! How many people will take the effort to master Mandarin, if their Chinese business counterpart can get by in English? (Yes, the number of native speakers is important, but not decisive: Bengali has more speakers than Russian.)
Spanish, on the other hand, has a good chance to be important (but not overcome English). Not only does it have a huge and growing population, official in twenty countries, and widespread in the U.S. and elswhere, but its native speakers often cannot be reached in English--even in the U.S.! (And their is a massive effort here to add more and more services in Spanish.) I've had to use Spanish on almost every sales position I've had (both internationally and domestically), while I never had to use anything but English with business people from China, Germany, France, etc.
I don't think that will hapen, but I believe there significant limits for the growth of English - the number of speakers of the other large languages (Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic etc).
Just think about it: right now there is a group of over 1 billion human beings among wich English is useless - Chinese. In the same way, there is a group of 250 million where english cannot penetrate and be the language of contact: Arabic; 350 for Spanish; 350 for Hindi; 220 for Portuguese etc etc.
The ideal situation for the English language would be if each country in the world (except for english-speaking countries) would have its own unique, incomprehensible-across-the-border language, making the use of English an absolute necessity.
But today, English is a RELATIVE necessity and it will most likely stay that way, because there are other large languages that cut across borders and continents that stop English achieving that status.
Chinese, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic are not powerfull enough to challenge English but, most importantly, they "ocupy" space, in effect stoping the English language from achieving complete dominance.
If you believe Joss Whedon then yes, Chinese will soon be the global superpower and their languages will become universal ;-)
I myself doubt that Chinese will become an international language, because of its difficulty to be learned by others, especially those using romance languages or other latin based tounges, such as English. Here I am talking about modern sort Chinese, because traditional Chinese, with its thousands of symbols, will be EXTREMELY hard to master, and only the most devoted will attempt it. I would say the same for Arabic, since its main reason for spreading was to interpret the Qur'an in its original faith, which is written in classical Arabic. The Arabic alphabet is also extremely different to the one that most people are used to with Latin characters, but the actual spoken language can be as varied as Portuguese is to Spanish, which is not surprising since the language is spoken from the Atlantic to the Himalayas. As for Spanish, it will become very important if the rate at which the Spanish speaking countries are growing, population wise as well as economically. It already is the overwhelmingly most spoken language in the Wester Hemisphere, and because it is easy to learn for those already using Romance languages, there will not be much to stop it from spreading in Europe if its influence were to spread. However I do not think that Spanish will be able to replace English as the main business language. Many countries and Africa are speaking English as an official language (although the actual number of speakers is not impressive) and India has succome to English, and with its populatin of 1 Billion+, it will replace the United States as the main English language country in the next 50 years. Unless India were to change its official language from English to Spanish, then Spanish would have a chance at replacing English as the main business language. But one isolated Spanish speaking country amist a sea of Russian, Arabic and Chinese will not change the scene much.
Seriously, Chinese isn't as hard as people make it out to be. I'm a native English speaker and have been studying Chinese (and living in China) for the last few years, and while learning characters is certainly a challenge, it's pretty easy in other ways (grammar, for instance, is a snap compared to the major European languages). I think most people who warn of the difficulties of learning Chinese are either 1) people who have seen lots of characters, think they're insane and have decided never to try it; or 2) Chinese people (many of which have an overinflated idea of their language's difficulty).
That said, I don't see it overtaking English, but certainly serving as a compliment in the next few decades. English will still be vital for landing jobs, but speaking both of them would make finding jobs a lot easier.
Could it be said that in actual fact English is in some ways more complicated than Chinese? John's already mentioned the grammar. If you put aside the differences in how they are written, and examine pronunciation, I know very little about Chinese but I gather that there are several subtle sounds that may sound the same the first time you hear them but are to the trained ear distinctively different. Whereas in English there are fewer sounds and so many words sound the same even to the native speaker but mean different things, and have to be understood from the context. I remember a friend who was moving to Korea (A completely different language I know, but I don't know any Chinese examples apart from by hearsay) and said that they were struggling with the difference between 'ng' 'ang' 'ngg' 'gng' and 'ung'. Well that's what it sounded like. They all sounded the same to me, but she said she could identify subtle differences between them, she could hear it when others spoke but hadn't quite mastered pronouncing them properly herself.
Even in view of writing systems, is it more or less likely that a reader of Chinese might mispronounce a word? Often in English there are several different words, or syllables, that are spelt the same and pronounced differently, or spelt differently and pronounced the same. Surely there would be less confusion on that note with unique characters for each individual word? Notwithstanding the vast effort it takes to learn them all, aren't there some ways in which syllable symbols and individual images per word can be identified and understood quicker by someone who knows them?
Do the Chinese have a simplified set of written symbols like the Japanese for those who cannot be bothered to learn the vast amount of individual characters?
Amatire,
Chinese (and I'm talking about Mandarin, the official dialect of the Mainland and Taiwan, though most (all?) dialects are broadly similiar) is a tonal language, making pronunciation pretty tough at first, as changes in tone change the meaning of the words. Coming from an English background, Chinese first sounded like total gibberish, but like anything with enough practice you can get it.
There are a few practical difficulties with the writing system. One, contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of Chinese words are multi-syllable, with most being composed of two syllables (and thus two characters). With no spaces between words, it can be difficult for learners to tell where one word stops and one begins.
Example: Any two adjacent characters in the sentence 解放大道路面积水 ("Water accumulated on the surface of Jiefang Boulevard") form a valid Chinese word, and so you have to just know that it is split like 解放|大道|路面|积|水 and not in some other way. Honestly, though, once you know the words it's not very hard.
Also, not all characters have a single pronunciation. Some differences are subtle and many native speakers don't use them correctly: 处 can be pronounced 'chu3' or 'chu4' (the numbers are tones), but the vast majority of Chinese use 'chu4' for all of the character's meanings. Most, however, you just learn through repetition.
Example: 家长 is pronounced jia1 zhang3, but 长 can be pronounced both 'zhang3' and 'chang2' depending on the context. However, the 'chang2' meaning ("long") wouldn't make sense in front of 家, where as 'zhang3' (in this case, meaning "leader") does (家长 is the head of a household, the "family leader").
There has been some research that shows characters convey information to readers faster than phonetic-based systems (this was done with Japanese, replacing the kanji with their kana equivalents and testing adults' reading speed). Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, since it means one less set of characters I need to learn) Chinese has no phonetic symbol set equivalent to Japanese kana (you can write in pinyin, which I used to indicate the pronunciation of words and characters earlier, but that's only taught to small children and falls out of use as they grow up).
Having been teaching English to Chinese and learning Chinese myself, I can certainly say that I'm glad I'm a native English speaker learning Chinese, not the other way around--English is freaking hard! :)
CHINESE
<< It's really a pity that Chinese language is only spoken by China's Mainland, Hongkong, Taiwan, and Macao, and it's still much too difficult to be an official International language in the world, so I can affirm that Chinese will NOT rise too much. >>
???
Singapore needs to be added to this list. Data that I have seen indicates that as of 2000 the Chinese constitute 76.8% of Singapore's population. Singapore's elder statesman and former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, has for many years, been promoting Chinese Mandarin in Singapore and strongly pushing the Singapore Chinese to use this language rather than other Chinese languages. I think that in the state schools in Singapore the Chinese are taught Mandarin Chinese for many years.
Geoff_One
Sorry, I even forgot Singapore, hahahaha,
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