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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: 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.