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The Washington Post has an article asking the question "Which languages will dominate the future?" The answer depends on your interests: making money in growth markets; speaking with as many people as possible; speaking only one language while traveling; or learning about culture. As you might imagine, the article concludes
There is no one single language of the future. Instead, language learners will increasingly have to ask themselves about their goals and own motivations before making a decision.
[...] In a recent U.K.-focused report, the British Council, a think tank, identified more than 20 growth markets and their main languages. The report features languages spoken in the so-called BRIC countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China — that are usually perceived as the world's biggest emerging economies, as well as more niche growth markets that are included in lists produced by investment bank Goldman Sachs and services firm Ernst & Young.
"Spanish and Arabic score particularly highly on this indicator," the British Council report concluded for the U.K. However, when taking into account demographic trends until 2050 as laid out by the United Nations, the result is very different.
Hindi, Bengali, Urdu and Indonesian will dominate much of the business world by 2050, followed by Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Russian. If you want to get the most money out of your language course, studying one of the languages listed above is probably a safe bet.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @12:01AM
The entire English-speaking world has already outsourced every industry to China.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @12:23AM
Well, until the next big thing becomes outsourcing to Africa. The PHBs will create another set of buzzwords for saving money by fabbing somewhere cheaper than China, then sell products back to the largest single market in the world.
When we are all old[er] and getting [more] curmudgeonly we will have to go through this process all over again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @12:55AM
> The PHBs will create another set of buzzwords for saving money by fabbing somewhere cheaper than China,
Its going to be robots. Africa will get used for raw resources. But the next big wave of manufacturing is going to be automation and the location is likely to be dictated by where shipping is cheapest - either shipping raw material to the factory or shipping finished materials to the market.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @01:11AM
The US started heavily automating manufacturing in the late '70s and early '80s. People in craptastic countries were cheaper than robots, even with shipping across the pacific.
The same will happen to every country until there isn't a single place in the world where humans are cheaper than machines.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @02:55AM
That analysis presumes that automated manufacturing never gets cheaper. That's demonstrably false.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @07:55AM
Yours assumes that no labor force is cheaper than China and thus outsourcing will stop with them. Both of those claims are demonstrably false.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @08:45AM
Economics in the end level out. When automated manufacturing gets cheaper, labor will eventually get cheaper too. But due to both getting cheaper, products get cheaper too. However, our central banks will add sufficient amounts of money to the money supply that neither will get cheaper but instead both will get more expensive. We call that inflation.
In the end more humans will probably do other kinds of work than what robots are better at. And our economies will be flooded with cheap and easy to manufacture automated-manufacturing made products (just like today already). The specialized things that require human creativity and ingenuity, the things that are uniquely built, will (just like today already) stay super expensive.
Nothing much will change.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheGratefulNet on Friday September 25 2015, @12:26AM
russian would be useful, too. I'm seeing lots of outsource work being sent to russia and ukraine.
oh, and cobol. always some kind of need for cobol guys.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @12:28AM
You need some custom malware for industrial espionage, comrade?
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Friday September 25 2015, @12:55AM
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday September 25 2015, @12:50AM
Not quite everything.
Chem/pharma and IT went to India
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Friday September 25 2015, @11:29AM
And as India is prepared to move towards English as their de facto international business language, I think that keeps English in pretty good stead for a pretty long time. And I'm disappointed to see "Russian" on the list - aren't we trying to embargo that out of use until Vlad I's empire implodes?
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by goodie on Friday September 25 2015, @01:04AM
Perhaps, but I'm not particularly interested in moving to China or having my kids live there considering the levels of pollution, corruption etc. There's a reason (actually a bunch of them) why many Chinese try to leave China these days. It's like a teenager growing too fast in that awkward phase where you don't really know how tall they will be, what their face will look like ;). Joke aside, my school now offers Chinese for Business courses, it's pretty popular among execs and people in the MBA program.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday September 25 2015, @04:18AM
I liked China, but the parts of China that are worth living in tend to have very little money. The rural parts are actually really nice with friendly people everywhere. The cities though, are rather miserable. There's plenty of things to do, but the Chinese try to take advantage of foreigners, the corruption and the pollution are ridiculous.
But, the rural areas are great if you can speak some Chinese, things are relaxed and there's amazing food to be had.
Unfortunately, most foreigners never get to see that side of China and it's rapidly disappearing as development spreads and the people move to the cities in search of a better quality of life.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Sunday September 27 2015, @02:14AM
In 1982, my grandma took a trip there. She learnt Mandarin, and went on a 3 week organized trip. This was 1982, not something as easy as it is today. And she was in her early sixties. I'm always impressed by her achievements regarding this. Anyway more to the point. She showed me a few months ago her pictures from that trip after she found her albums and I swear I wish I would turn back time to see it then. It looked like the exotic, hospitable country that I imagined back when I was growing up and got interested in Asian cultures. It looked like old martial arts movies where people sit at a large round table, eat and drink tea, play games etc. But now they're running so quick to destroy all that that what took thousands of years to build and cultivate will be gone within a century or so at this pace... I find it very sad.
I have a coworker who's mother in law came to visit Canada once and she would spend 20 min washing vegetables before every meal and using boiled water to do it. The guy had to tell her, every time, that vegetables and water were a lot cleaner here. And yet I'm not sure I love our veggies that much here ;).
(Score: 2) by goodie on Sunday September 27 2015, @02:16AM
Oh and the lanscapes on those pictures... She took a cruise along the Yangtze river and the pictures were breathtaking. Now you're lucky if you can see the sky in Shanghai apparently...
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @12:54PM
China is as delightful as you describe. We can all truly look forward to a world with China at its center. Conveniently enough, it's already called "zhongguo," or "Kingdom at the Center" ('Middle Kingdom' is the literal translation, but the proper connotation doesn't carry over into English). To help enterprising MBAs with their business careers, here are some key phrases to use in China:
"Bu yao!" -- "I don't want it," typically yelled at street vendors trying to get you to buy jade pendants.
"Tai gui" -- "Too expensive," best said with a derisive laugh.
"Ni fangpi!" -- lit. "You're farting!", in essence "Bullshit!"
"Ni zougou zibenjia he yinggai mashangde kaishi ziping" -- "You are a running dog capitalist and should immediately begin a self-criticism (a Cultural Revolution-era practice)".
And the most important of all:
"Shi, laoban!" -- "Yes, boss!"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Friday September 25 2015, @03:09PM
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @07:29PM
Yes, well, tone marks are useless to those who don't know them, and obvious to those that do. In either case, not worth the extra bother. The one longer phrase I cited was for comic effect, and you either know it, or you don't. The others you must instantly know if you speak Mandarin and know the English meaning. Context tells. "Tai gui" cannot reasonably mean "too demon!" in a business context. "Bu yao" cannot mean "don't shake" when speaking to street vendors. I know the difference, and your reply suggests you might, too, so implying that I don't is a not so clever attempt to say that I am not aware that tonal differences make a significant difference in a tonal language. "Mama ma ma ma?" can mean, "Does mother scold the horse?" or something quite different depending on the tones, but it's so idiomatic that phrase that should you pretend you don't know what's indicated without the tonal marks it establishes that you're being coy.
Shi bu shi, tongzhi?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Saturday September 26 2015, @03:13AM
The tones are only obvious if you already know the words.
I used to study Mandarin years ago, forgot most of it since I never got a chance to use it, but I still know how to read pinyin.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Friday September 25 2015, @02:40AM
And the entire Chinese speaking world is rushing to teach their children English because that's where the cultural, scientific, engineering, artistic, design, and every other aspect of transmittable culture is headed. When a German and a Chinese business man want to speak together (without a terp) they use English. The English speaking Internet is larger than all the other languages combined. More books are published in English than any other language.
English is the first global lingua franca--partially because it's an amoeba that absorbs and assimilates any other language it encounters into something intelligible by native speakers, and partially because computers and the Internet are Latin Alphabet-centric. Any language that isn't usable with a standard QWERT(Y/Z) keyboard is fighting momentum and is destined to lose. Chinese is absolutely horrendous to use with a keyboard. Japanese is barely usable. A simple alphabet with roughly 2 dozen characters is ergonomic to human hands and thus is the natural winner. Chinese is simply inscrutable to anyone not deeply familiar with it (historically, it was somewhat intended to be) but English words are "discoverable" once you start learning roots and suffixes/prefixes--even if your knowledge is from a completely different language. I don't speak Spanish or even a Romance language, but a Spanish text is at least 50% understandable just because of the cognates.
It's not ethnocentrism; German, French, or Spanish could easily have been the winners. Accidents of history put English in the winner's circle. As a native English speaker, I am thankful, but I recognize it's largely an arbitrary quirk of pure chance.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday September 25 2015, @03:46AM
You're generally right. Another example is that English is a widely used language in India.
However, you're dead wrong about keyboards. It is not at all difficult to use Chinese and other Asian languages with a keyboard. There are multiple ways to do it; one of the most popular for Chinese is to just type using a standardized transliteration of Chinese to the Latin alphabet and have software auto-convert that into the language's native script. I have seen this done and it works fine. Maybe in the days of DOS and teletypes you were right, but technology advances, man.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by moondrake on Friday September 25 2015, @09:09AM
I would still argue the system is somewhat cumbersome. You are typing the Latin alphabet, and then select the character you want from a (sometimes long) list. Since Chinese has many more sounds than English, its not that easy to transliterate and this makes it sometimes a bit cumbersome to find the character you want. Of course, computers get smarter and know from the context what you probably want to say, but we all know what kind of silly things are the result of word completion sometimes... This gets worse if you are actually not 100% sure the character you just typed is the one you wanted...
From anecdotal evidence, I get the feeling this system however has a very detrimental effect on peoples writing ability. I speak (not really write though) some Mandarin and worked for some time in China. I noticed many young people where having trouble writing non-trivial Hanzi (with a pen) because they are 99% of the time using it passively with a PC or phone. It also results in people more often guessing from the list, and using the wrong character for a particular sound. When this trend continues, I suspect that it will slowly erode some of the complexity of the language to be more convenient to use with electronics. That may not be a bad thing however:)
I have seen people suggest that the Japanese/Chinese should just drop their 'silly' characters, and just write the "sound" like we (mostly) do. This will not happen in the foreseeable future. The ability to write "meaning" instead of sound is a key part of the language and culture of these countries. A character is more than its sound and can convey some emotion. Compare it with this: what leaves more impact on you, the word "toxic" or the skull-and-crossbones symbol (☠)?
For Japanese especially it would be complicated anyway as there are so many words that are pronounced similar, that an advanced text would become ambiguous (and you cannot ask for clarification like in a conversation). To users of characters, an alphabet system may even seem vastly inferior as it merely conveys some sounds (and often imperfectly), instead of the actual content of a story. This makes the reading experience a very different thing (to me it results in no inner voice with sounds, just images of the things discussed).
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Friday September 25 2015, @05:19PM
I've not personally used it, but, when deciding on how cumbersome it is, you have to remember that Chinese is a much compact language. So something like 50 characters per minute typing speed would be pretty good.
Note too that, in English, you don't use a "normal" keyboard when you need to type super-fast. You use a specially-designed chordal keyboard. This is how stenographers are able to keep up with the spoken word in courtrooms. The standard keyboard isn't that great.
There are also stroke-based methods to input Chinese, where you use a QWERTY keyboard to "type" the strokes needed to make the character you want.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @12:39PM
I speak a lot of languages and I agree with you: the language to learn is still English. Even if America fades as a global power, the chances are very good that English will persist in its current role because it's also what India uses, and they're ascendant. We also have history as our guide: Akkadian was the "global" language to learn long after its speakers had gone to dust, then Greek came along, which had a good, long run even after Athens and Sparta had become meaningless backwaters. Of course, Latin. The global language for a long time after the barbarians sacked Rome. English, too, has a ton of linguistic momentum--it's the language of business, science, culture, etc. Just one of those areas by itself could carry the language along for another 1,000 years.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 25 2015, @07:03AM
Which Chinese? It's a group of languages.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @12:33PM
Putonghua, of course. "Common Speech," aka Mandarin. Fun factoid: The CCP only made it the mainland's official language in 1988.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Friday September 25 2015, @07:14AM
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