On Feb 21, 2008, at 5:58 PM, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2008/02/21/future-english-chinese-tech-cx_no_language_sp08_0221lingua.html
<q>
But English is not thereby immune to the principles of language
survival. Above all, it is notable that beyond the 330 million or so
native speakers, perhaps twice as many more use it as a second
language. And this community of over 600 million second-language
speakers, who make English pre-eminent as a world language, also
make it vulnerable in the long term.
</q>
There is an important difference now that makes the argument from
history less valid, and that difference is pervasive globalization,
and in the case of English, distribution of its native reservoirs. In
the past, lingua franca languages have died because there was
typically a single native reservoir and there were always other vast
native language reservoirs around the world where there was zero
economic benefit to learning the lingua franca as a practical matter,
and hence negligible incentive. As individual geopolitical centers
waxed and waned, the lingua franca waxed and waned with it because the
utility evaporated. It was not even until the last few centuries that
any language had something approximating an established global reach.
As an accident of timing and history, I think English is here to stay
precisely because it is so distributed. Its fortunes are not tied to
any single geopolitical center but to a large collection of relatively
successful industrialized economies on almost every continent. And
with global media and the Internet, it would not vanish even if the
native English-speaking world suddenly withdrew into its own borders.
The only language that has remotely similar distribution is Spanish,
but that language is not going to be a lingua franca by any stretch of
the imagination due to the collection of countries in which it is
native.
China offers what is probably the most interesting alternative, due
almost entirely to the size of its base; in my anecdotal experience it
seems to be one of the major countries that English has penetrated the
least as well. The major problem, though, is that the reservoirs of
native Chinese speakers are tied to single region of the globe.
Cheers,
J. Andrew Rogers
