What is the next global lingua franca and why?

General discussion about learning languages

What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Arabic
1
2%
Esperanto (or any other conlang)
2
5%
French
1
2%
Hindi-Urdu
0
No votes
Malay/Indonesian
1
2%
Mandarin
12
29%
Portuguese
0
No votes
Spanish
7
17%
Russian
1
2%
Other (tell us in your answer)
16
39%
 
Total votes: 41

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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Serpent » Fri Nov 09, 2018 2:52 pm

Most threads on this topic end up closed. Please try to get back on track now :) :|
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby SGP » Fri Nov 09, 2018 3:01 pm

Serpent wrote:Most threads on this topic end up closed. Please try to get back on track now :) :|


"On this topic" = ?
Do you simply mean any off-topic discussion that isn't directly related to "the next lingua franca?", no matter if it is about either of Flying Dutchmen ;) or Non-Flying Communication Analysts :lol: ?
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Serpent » Fri Nov 09, 2018 3:28 pm

Most threads about the global lingua franca, the influence of English, whether Chinese or Spanish or whatever is next, etc, eventually get closed.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby tarvos » Fri Nov 09, 2018 11:04 pm

Within six or seven generations it will disappear from certain urbanized areas. In the long run it will turn into a sociolect for the poor and may be the official SECOND language of the Netherlands!


How optimistic of you to assume we have that many generations left.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Nov 10, 2018 11:19 am

English is now without doubt the language of academia -- there is no research topic that can be adequately investigated without reading papers written in English.

How can any other language take over from English now? What language could possibly offer enough of a benefit to stop people learning a language which untold millions of scientific papers are written in?

English can only lose its power in two situations:

1) Fall of civilisation -- a new "dark age" where the knowledge of previous generations is forgotten. Until recently, I could only imagine this would happen in the case of a nuclear war, but with the flat earth movement and the rise of quacks and "alternative treatments", I suppose it's possible that we could undergo an "Ignorant Revolution" in the not too distant future.

2) A completely new paradigm of science rendering the old science obsolete. The decline of Latin as lingua franca seems to tie in with a major chance in science -- the emergence of modern chemistry, physics and medicine -- and English started to gain power around the time of the atom bomb and quantum physics. But given how well modern science describes the world, it's hard to see it ever becoming truly obsolete.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby tommus » Sat Nov 10, 2018 12:43 pm

That is an excellent concise analysis by Cainntear. That's probably what will shape the future. However, there is perhaps a third "situation" that could have a major influence on the global lingua franca. That situation could be based on money and wealth which translate to power and influence. Wealth pays for scientific research and researchers. It pays for all manner of written and spoken material including education, administration, literature, reading material, entertainment material, the Internet, etc. Money talks.

Three hundred years ago, I think it would have been difficult to accurately predict the lingua franca situation we are in today. How well do we think that we can predict the situation that will shape how our future world will look like three hundred years from now?
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Cainntear » Sat Nov 10, 2018 2:14 pm

tommus wrote:However, there is perhaps a third "situation" that could have a major influence on the global lingua franca. That situation could be based on money and wealth which translate to power and influence. Wealth pays for scientific research and researchers. It pays for all manner of written and spoken material including education, administration, literature, reading material, entertainment material, the Internet, etc. Money talks.

Translation costs a lot, and to translate all the important documents of every academic discipline into a new language would cost an inconceivable amount of money. Not only that, but it would take so long that learning English in school would be an absolute necessity so that your kids would have a future chance at a job as a translator... which would mean that everyone with academic aspirations would still be fluent in English, so there would be no need for the translated versions of the academic literature as everybody reading it would be able to read the original.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Axon » Sat Nov 10, 2018 3:24 pm

I think Cainntear has an excellent point, but how many scientific papers are we really reading that are more than two or three generations old? Surely as science and languages continue to develop, there will be people who publish literature reviews and authoritative works in other languages, and then those will be cited instead of 21st or 22nd century English papers.

I wonder if written English will stay mostly the same as various world Englishes develop into mutually unintelligible languages. My own English is in the process of consonant and vowel shifting away from the English that I teach in school, though the changes are very subtle right now. I would say that there are already widely-spoken varieties of English that are mutually unintelligible with one another, and only the listening exposure to more internationally popular Englishes allow people of those backgrounds to communicate.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Nov 10, 2018 3:42 pm

Cainntear wrote:
tommus wrote:However, there is perhaps a third "situation" that could have a major influence on the global lingua franca. That situation could be based on money and wealth which translate to power and influence. Wealth pays for scientific research and researchers. It pays for all manner of written and spoken material including education, administration, literature, reading material, entertainment material, the Internet, etc. Money talks.

Translation costs a lot, and to translate all the important documents of every academic discipline into a new language would cost an inconceivable amount of money. Not only that, but it would take so long that learning English in school would be an absolute necessity so that your kids would have a future chance at a job as a translator... which would mean that everyone with academic aspirations would still be fluent in English, so there would be no need for the translated versions of the academic literature as everybody reading it would be able to read the original.
Academics in particular disciplines already have to learn reading skills in languages other than english, so I don't see that as something that prevents new language X emerging.

That said, I don't think anything is going to replace English as the world-lingua-franca, it's embedded in too many different ways.
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Re: What is the next global lingua franca and why?

Postby Djedida » Mon Nov 12, 2018 7:54 am

Spanish is already the 2nd most spoken language in the world and the population of native French speakers is rising. If I had to make a guess based on trends, I would gamble on Spanish or French becoming the next Western lingua franca within a century or so.

Arabic would make another interesting alternative, except there exists too much variation between one "dialect" to another, to the point that they arguably different languages. The recent immigrations into Europe could provide Arabic a greater global presence, not being just a dominant Middle Eastern language, but a Eurasian-African presence.

Lastly I have my doubts about Mandarin becoming a lingua franca. China once had influence over Japan, Korea, and Vietnam and it was obvious to see with the writing systems. This influence has been waning in favor of western influence. While Mandarin is considered a useful business language to learn, I'm not sure it is seen as a "prestige" language like French.

tl;dr Spanish or French, possibly Arabic, but not Mandarin.

Personally I think it would be awesome if both the Spanish and French spheres spoke Italian as a sort of middle ground.
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