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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: 4, Insightful) by Aighearach on Friday September 25 2015, @03:15AM
While that is true, another reality is that while the contemporary language of business has shifted to the largest economies, it was always the largest of the economies that is also a cultural center. Having a lot of people isn't going to make any of these places into a major business center. Regardless of the state of the Indian economy in 50 years, their languages are not going to achieve much use. They are a center of a lot of culture, but only for people already invested; they are not a casual source of culture. They would need 50 years just to get into a position to be in the running 50 years later. Indonesian... I'm assuming somebody did a population projection without considering land availability.
Portuguese has no chance, because most of the Brazil's neighbors speak Spanish and they're always going to be going into things using a third language. There is just not very much advantage to learning Portuguese as one of your first 5 languages, even if you do business with Brazil, unless you're a foreign specialist who only does business there, which is rare.
Arabic is a real wild card because of regional instability.
Russian will continue to decline, for numerous obvious reasons, such as: small population, not a cultural center or even well liked, not seen as being better at anything in business anymore, most of their economy is exporting natural resources, which gives no benefit at all to learning their language. They could turn all that around eventually, but it is a lot of different trend lines to reverse.
China continues to grow both in economic and cultural influence. The language is exceptionally difficult, though. Simply spending time learning it won't be enough for adults to pick it up well enough that Chinese business people are going to prefer it to English. So I expect huge growth here, but it won't become the default language. Though it probably will be the default business language for speakers of many of the languages listed, like Bengali and Indonesian.
The extrapolations are not impressive. I think a language like German has a better chance; it is already a major international 2nd language, it is fairly easy to learn and speak, easy to translate from text, and computers can translate it fairly well. Because of the tradition as a scientific language, it already has the full range of technical words and concepts. Germany continues to be a major business and scientific influence. A future integrated EU nation-state might have German as the main language.
Many of the languages proposed are simply not very good for business because a lack of specific literal terms related to business.
Time will tell if Arabic wealth evaporates after the oil market crashes. Once poor people in the west are buying used electric cars, and Chinese middle class are buying electric as their first car, some parts of these maps might change drastically.
Another factor is that because of the internet and international communication, the default language might have a lot more staying power; the shifting culture of the past might become a continuously-melting pot, where something like language becomes more difficult to change. In the past, there weren't large international libraries of data that would be lost when switching languages.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Friday September 25 2015, @03:45AM
I'd like to point out that learning minor languages means that while you can't use them everywhere, you do have a competitive advantage if you're doing business in that location.
Right now if you go to China and speak Mandarin you're going to have a lot of credibility with the locals in most parts of China, but in 10 or 20 years, that's probably not going to be the case. You'd have far more credibility in Guangdong by learning Cantonese, same goes for other areas that don't speak Mandarin as their first language. You'll be able to connect with the locals a lot more easily and show a willingness to invest in the relationships.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday September 25 2015, @01:16PM
I concur on Russian and Arabic. Once oil is passe, they're passe.
Chinese is not that hard to gain a grasp of, though. The grammar is simple and the pronunciation of the characters is consistent, not at all like Japanese, which chooses from multiple Chinese- and Japanese readings of kanji at seeming random. Chinese characters work rather more like a really big alphabet, and the radicals assembled to make an ideogram give you a real leg up to grasp the meaning, something about the pronunciation, and help a lot with recall in the same way that memory experts advise you to make up funny sentences or images to remember words or concepts. The hardest thing about Chinese is developing an ear for tones, and retaining it after you haven't been immersed in it for a while. Once swimming in it daily, though, it's easy to pick up the patter. That said, I do entirely agree that nobody's gonna learn Chinese unless China physically conquers the world and forces everybody to learn it in colonial fashion.
German is a great language, but despite the shared heritage with English and a lot of common vocabulary, the grammar is a bear. It's harder than English. Case declensions and funky word order complicate things a lot. Plus, nobody outside of Central Europe really speaks German. There's not much of a residual colonial past to help it out globally, the way there is for French. So it's much more likely to be like Chinese: great to know if you're there, but not much else.
Spanish will putter along as it always has, indispensible in Central and South America, not much use elsewhere.
Indonesian would tickle me pink, because you gotta love a language where to make something plural, you say it twice: "cewek" -- chick, "cewek cewek" -- chicks.
Nah, the real answer is English. English is still the language to learn and will be for a long, long time.
Washington DC delenda est.