What is the next global lingua franca and why?

[rdearman]

‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ -- Albert Einstein.

Even if Einstein expressed this exact sentiment, he was not the first to do so. In September 1946, more than six months before the quote was first attributed to Einstein, a reporter attributed this quip to an unnamed Army lieutenant

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[Cainntear]

‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’ -- Albert Einstein.

Even if Einstein expressed this exact sentiment, he was not the first to do so. In September 1946, more than six months before the quote was first attributed to Einstein, a reporter attributed this quip to an unnamed Army lieutenant

Fair enough. I looked up the actual "quote" and I have to say I was surprised by "I know not" -- Einstein wasn't an 17th century Englishman, after all....

[fcoulter]

Mandarin will never be a global lingua franca, and the dominance of English will never end because of the "winner-takes-all" effect.

The Amazon rainforest is one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Scientists have cataloged approximately 20,000 different tree species in the Amazon. But despite this remarkable level of diversity, researchers have discovered that there are approximately 200 "hyperdominant" tree species that make up nearly half of the rainforest. Just 1 percent of tree species account for 50 percent of the trees in the Amazon.

But why?

Imagine two plants growing side by side. Each day they will compete for sunlight and soil. If one plant can grow just a little bit faster than the other, then it can stretch taller, catch more sunlight, and soak up more rain. The next day, this additional energy allows the plant to grow even more. This pattern continues until the stronger plant crowds the other out and takes the lion’s share of sunlight, soil, and nutrients.

From this advantageous position, the winning plant has a better ability to spread seeds and reproduce, which gives the species an even bigger footprint in the next generation. This process gets repeated again and again until the plants that are slightly better than the competition dominate the entire forest.

Scientists refer to this effect as "accumulative advantage". What begins as a small advantage gets bigger over time. One plant only needs a slight edge in the beginning to crowd out the competition and take over the entire forest.

Winner-takes-all leads to winner-takes-most. If one road is slightly more convenient than the other, then more people travel down it and more businesses are likely to build alongside it. As more businesses are built, people have additional reasons for using the road and so it gets even more traffic.

The same thing applies to languages. Over time, those that are slightly faster to reach every corner of the world end up with the majority of speakers (as L1 or L2). Those that are slightly slower end up with next to nothing.

"For all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away." - Matthew in his gospel.

Once upon a time, the closest thing we had to a lingua franca was a combination of latin & greek. The two languages continued as the dominent languages (primarily in Europe) long after Rome & Greece were no longer relevent. Why? Because the two languages served a purpose that no other single language fulfilled.

Then French took over for a while, but it's reign as the lingua franca only lasted a couple hundred years, maybe a hundred years or so after France (Napolean) was relevent. Right now, the lingua franca is English. Due to British, followed by American, domination of the world, English has ended up in all sorts of places. More importantly, like Latin, English is being used in areas of the economy where a common language is important, even if the Britain or the United States isn't. (One example is air travel. From what I understand, all commercial pilots must speak English and all control towers work in English.)

After the United States falls (and every country falls), the use of English will continue for quite a while. Why? Because having a common tongue is convenient for many activities. However, it won't last forever. Will English dominance last the thousand years that Latin lasted after the fall of Rome? Hard to say. There really weren't any other alternatives around at the time.

Assuming that the fall of the United States is part of a wider civilizational decline, English should remain the lingua franca for quite a while, only to be replaced when another nation (which may not even exist now) rebuilds and tends to dominate the world political and economic spheres. However, if the fall of the United States is not accompanied by a wider civilizational decline, then I'd expect English to be replaced by whatever the new dominent nation's language is. But that will easily take a hundred years, with vestigages of English in use for quite a while. (I don't have my passport in front of me; is a lot of the text still in French? It used to be.)

As to which nation that will be? No clue. I don't think it will be China; I'm concerned that the foundation of China's recent economic growth is not as solid as it could be, and I could easily see China having serious economic issues in the relatively near future. More importantly for the idea of Chinese as a lingua franca, I think that modern technology would tend to favor a language with an alphabet (or equivalent) rather than a language with pictographs. However, since Chinese is primarily the language of a single country, this could be changed by governmental fiat. This has happened with other languages - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... llic-latin

[Mooby]

Mandarin will never be a global lingua franca, and the dominance of English will never end because of the "winner-takes-all" effect.

The Amazon rainforest....

I think you're overstating the likelihood of English's dominance never ending.
One could argue that all systems eventually fail according to laws of expansion and entropy, stars for example expand and eventually implode/explode to become black holes or white dwarves. Economic systems can get 'too big' and crash. Using your forest analogy, we know that canopy species lose dominance with periodic and catastrophic events such as storms and fires. The Common Beech Fagus sylvatica forms dominant canopies in Europe by casting dense shade on the undergrowth and having leaves that contain high levels of phenol such that they very slowly decay and thereby smoother competing species. After the 'Great Storm' in 1987 in the UK, huge swathes of Beech were blown down, creating gaps for shorter-lived opportunistic species like Ash and Birch to temporarily dominant. And longer term, climate change has and will continue to alter everything.

Whilst I think English will continue to grow, I don't think it will be without cessation; otherwise we will end up with an anglicized cosmos....now there's a thought!

[Serpent]

Emoji

[iguanamon]

Emoji

I already find that I am not fully fluent in emoji. maybe we could bring back Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics

[SGP]

Assembly / machine code.

Are you fluent in ASM? Because I am not. And the only opcode I remember is (HEX) 90 which is NOOP (no operation)

[EDIT: No pun intended, don't even want to "offend" machines that wouldn't realize it anyway. Reminds me, although I don't play any computer games, of a certain one I read about where one could, yes, really, get a message like "You have been arrested for harassing a wooden fence". Too bizarre.].

[SGP]

And about Mandarin... still wondering how probable exactly it would be that, even if it doesn't become a global lingua franca (I for one am at least not assuming it), this language would get something like an additional international significance for those who do inter-country communication? Really wondering about that one because tonal languages still are the most difficult type to me. Relatively speaking. Although I don't label neither Mandarin nor Cantonese as Genuinely Difficult to Learn.

[rdearman]

Assembly / machine code.

Are you fluent in ASM? Because I am not. And the only opcode I remember is (HEX) 90 which is NOOP (no operation).

I used to me fluent in MASM, and I did try and use NASM and some passing familiarity with inline assembler with GCC. But I wouldn't say fluent anymore! I recenlty looked at Flat Assmbler and thought I might give it a whirl.

[SGP]

Assembly / machine code.

Are you fluent in ASM? Because I am not. And the only opcode I remember is (HEX) 90 which is NOOP (no operation).

I used to me fluent in MASM, and I did try and use NASM and some passing familiarity with inline assembler with GCC. But I wouldn't say fluent anymore! I recenlty looked at Flat Assmbler and thought I might give it a whirl.

Not ceasing to be surprised today because of several reasons, even if they do not necessarily include assembly. But it still isn't happening every day to me to even meet someone who did it in the past.

[EDIT: Did a few edits in this post because of typos...]

Is there any natural human language you consider to be at least a bit close to assembly? And if yes, why? [Full disclosure: I am of human ancestry. Haven't been raised by trolls, and they also aren't included in my genealogical tree].

As for a little anecdote, someone I knew was laughing because of a certain "gear of hardware". Because it said "do not disassemble". As it is no real secret , this is used for both "taking its pieces apart" and "converting an executable file to assembly language".

Just as myself, this person isn't a native of English. So to him, it could have been seemed as if the manufacturer told the customers, [NoShout PointingOutInstead] "DON'T YOU DARE LOOK AT OUR PRECIOUS HARDWARE GEAR SOURCECODE!!!".