the future of global language and why Chinese is an unlikely candidate

My English friend told me once:
'English is a very difficult language to be spoken correctly and very easy to be spoken as you pleased and be perfectly understood'.

Several years have past and now I clearly see his point. Communicating in English require in truth not so much knowledge of the grammar or huge range of vocabulary. What you need is the confidence to speak whatever and however (oh my... how many people do that those days)and patience, human understanding (beyond any language) and willingness to have a dialogue in the first place. The last three, being the attributes normally of the more linguistically advanced speaker.

English became and establish itself as a global language of politics, business and science. But it wasn't always like that of course. If we take a step back in time, we will see that for centuries political and cultural elites of Europe communicated in French. Until today French language is considered the language of diplomats.

So why French... well for several obvious reasons. Firstly, France being the biggest country in Western Europe with the huge at the time military and economical power was able to extend its influence beyond it borders. Right, that's all good, you can say, but the German Empire was also powerful and influential. Which leads to another point. Unlike French, German does not derives directly from Latin, although of course influenced by it as almost any language in Europe, has its roots in Proto-Germanic. And the importance of Latin, funny enough, as the Lingua Franca is commonly known. Since Latin survived the collapse of the Roman Empire, not only as the language of the religion but also in the diplomatic and political sphere, although until the 'unification' of rules and standards of Latin by French monarch Charlemagne, variations in spelling and pronunciation as well as 'localisms' where extremely widespread. Charlemagne managed to reform Latin with the help of, surprise surprise, Irish monks, who were believed to have the most pure and unchanged classical Latin.
For the same reason - being as close to Latin as it gets, Italian had his popular time, however more in culture than socio-economical settings.

In the huge short cut
Latin was highly influenced by Greek. And through the medium of Ancient Greek, that derived from Linear A and B languages of which we know very little (especially linear A seems to be rather 'mysterious' in its large part for linguists) Latin was somehow related to Sanskrit, since both Latin and the languages directly based on Sanskrit (Hindu, Sinhalese and so on) share some basic words (such as bread: pan -Latin, pane - Sinhalese just to give one example).

The politics and history shape the languages, make them distinct or dominant. If we look at ancient Mesopotamia, we will see how one culture pushed the language of a previous group away upon they arrival in the region, preserving it for spiritual or religious use.


So, that's about the history. How about the future?

We may identify several factors influencing the evolution of the language:

• political, economical and military power;
• the size of the population speaking the language as natives;
• cultural or religious influence;
• geo-political neighbourhood;
• expansion;

Rapidly growing economical and military power - China, may create the possible candidate for the global language - Chinese which might result necessity for the politicians and business people to learn Chinese. However, it seems to me that Chinese from their part recognise the importance of English and learn it on the massive scale. It may come as surprise however, that some political analysts and futurists predict a fall of China as world's power sooner than we thing. Some also indicate that Turkey would take its place. So perhaps you could start learning Turkish as soon as possible wanting to jump on the bandwagon before anybody else. Another emerging economic power might possibly be Brazil, but it is unlikely that Portuguese would ever become a candidate for the Global Language. Especially if we take into consideration its closeness to Spanish, then we may assume that there will be no need for Portuguese to expand.
The usage of Spanish would rise steadily in North America due to the migration from Central America and growth of the Spanish speaking population.
English would be widely used in the European Union, but depending on the power shifts in South and Eastern Europe Russian may give a way to other Slavic languages such as Polish or Slovene, or to some kind of Pan-Slavic language.

Dismissing the candidates:

Why not Chinese:
Chinese as we all know it, is a very difficult language mostly because of its pronunciation and melody which is crucial in proper communication.. Mandarin has around 4 'accents' meaning that I word, said with different intonation may have 4 different meanings (anybody who attempted to learn Mandarin will surely know that from the standard example of the word: 'ma'). Also, quite alien grammar, highly imprecise time wise (no tenses) which again surprisingly may pose more difficulties. That is all in quite sharp contrast and the opposition to English. And this is precisely what makes English so popular. However, I am not dismissing the Chinese characters and I believe some of them may come into everyday use to make writing shorter.

Why not Hindi:
Although population of India, economical importance of the country and the number Hindi speakers is huge, so is the number of 'Indian Languages' that are not only in some cases very different from one another but also do not share one script. Due to that fact, English remains as one of the official languages of India, long after decolonisation and it is widely spoken.

Why not Spanish:
Although Spanish is the second spoken language around the globe, Spanish speaking countries, have no significant influence neither in politics, economy, nor science. Then again, I will not try to dismiss Spanish in social settings as the number of Spanish speakers is huge around the world.

Why not some kind of artificial creation such as Esperanto:

Because. In my view, artificial languages have no chance of becoming popular on the global scale.

So what possibly the future holds for the Global Language:

• Further progress and dominance of English with very distinct localisms and borrowings from the variety of different languages. No language is so flexible and adaptive as English, perhaps because modern English itself is based on a fantastic mix of languages: Latin and French, Saxon (Germanic), Norwegian and Gaelic (Celtic).
• Expansion of Arabic, which will be most likely if the religion of Islam and Arabic-speaking population will expand and prevail, but it is also more likely if (as Turks have done with their language) the Arabic would adapt the Latin alphabet. It is highly unlikely in my view, that something that is not written in the Latin script would have a chance to dominate the world.
• Multilingual global society that would be able to communicate perfectly well in many different languages. This is the most likely option in my opinion, basing on the given evidence that the languages evolve in geographic isolation from each other.

As in the past different groups migrated across Europe and southern Asia, loosing contact with each other causing pronunciations to shift, grammatical details to be altered.
How different the situation appears today. Instead of isolation, we have a great mix of cultures and languages. The true melting pot of identities, sometimes embedded in just one individual.

If you were born in Western Europe, you are likely that your parents come from different countries, sometimes even different from the one you were born in. If you are European, you are also more likely to change your location multiple times throughout your life. And that your future spouse would have a different cultural and linguistic background than yours.

In the global world, with increased communication, media and human mobility as well as related international and interracial marriages, the children of the future would have no one, no two but even more languages that would be classified as their native. And their careers, jobs and education would give them many more to master.

That last scenario I am actually quite fond of. And I hope that if this is ever to happen, then that would be the first step for mutual understanding between people that would be able to alter forever human interaction and direct it into commonalities of identities rather than divisions.

The Future Of Progress

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Douglas Adams, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

Ever since the prehistoric times, humans created tools which were used to compensate for our disabilities and faults. The first spear was thrown because men were not fast enough to catch deers and not strong enough to face mammoths. The wheel was invented because there was a limit to how much and how far man (or their beasts) could carry loads, and even clothes were originally created to help us survive in punishing weather conditions.

Later on, more complicated tools and machines were created in order to empower people and make them more productive. New ways of providing energy to these machines made them even more powerful, useful and in many cases much deadlier. In the last 70 years a new breed of machines evolved, that were not created to improve man's physical abilities, but rather his mental ones: computers can calculate faster, memorize more accurately and retrieve those memories much better and faster than any person. No wonder many of us have several of these, often in our own pockets.

There are two common denominators to all of these machines, which includes even the most advanced ones: none of them can actually work for a sustained period of time without human intervention and all of them were invented by humans. Even the most advanced robots and the fastest computers still need us to survive, and advances in technology and science which enables the creation of even more complex machines is created solely by us, humans.

But can this situation change? We assume that the last advantage we have over machines is our brains, which are still many orders of magnitude faster than the most powerful supercomputer, not to mention other advantages we have like self-awareness. But let's face it: even now, there are many man-made systems that cannot be fully grasped by one person. To make matters even more interesting, we will reach a point in which computers will overtake us in terms of raw computing power. This day is actually not far - it will probably happen before the middle of the current century.

Computing power is not everything though and several advances in artificial intelligence will have to be made but as it often happened before, new inventions or new found power source led to new and unpredictable uses. This might just be the case with AI as well: more computer power will lead to more advanced algorithms which might eventually lead to increasingly sophisticated AI and even what many calls "Singularity" - the point where artificial intelligence will surpass ours.

The Singularity movement claims that at this point and on, man kind will not be able to determine his own future because the technological changes will occur so rapidly and decisions will be made by computers equipped with super-intelligence. They will be smarter, make better decisions and we will likely not understand their reasoning.

Sounds scary, isn't it? And why shouldn't we be afraid? Our pop culture feeds on this fear: "2001: Space Odyssey", "Terminator", "The Matrix" and even "1984" show us worlds ran by machines in which humans cannot control their faith and become slaves - but will this be the actual case? Are we that great at managing ourselves? How many decisions do politicians make each day that are based upon faulty logic, lack of information or petty interests? How come, despite our amazing advances, 1.5 billion people can hardly make a living?

We cannot predict the results of the Singularity assuming that it will happen, in the same way that no one could predict that the first thrown spear was the first step toward the moon landing or the wheel being the first step toward the Bugatti Veyron. So like any other historical milestone, we should be open-eyed about it but do not dismiss it.

the past and the future of the mobile phones

Do any of you remember the time BEFORE the mobile phones?
How did we use to keep in touch, arrange the meetings and appointments, inform others about the emergencies? Well we did. And we did quite well. For centuries.Perhaps we were better organised, punctual and reliable than we tend to be now.

I was in the High School when the wave of GSM started slowly conquering the souls of young people. The handsets ceased to be of the size that could easily classify them as the weapons of mass destruction. And by that I mean not only the annihilation of the large quantities of user's brain cells. The 'analog brick', oversized and heavy could serve as a tool designed for the assault on the fellow human being.
And then of course came the price that would allow rather average teenager to afford a newest model.

Amongst my friends, the good old Alcatel was on the top of the list, not because it was such a brilliant phone but because the network providers gave it away for free, when largely unaware parents, dragged to the store by their offsprings, signed up for the 1-year (oh yes! those were the times) contract. Other models, also popular: Ericsson (no, not Sony Ericsson), Nokia and Simens. At that stage you would rather want to avoid Samsung with his HUGE handset, that recalled the analog models. And most likely caused a brain tumour.

Unlike with the analog technology, the GSM had several network providers and the competition was fierce. Some of the companies in order to lure clients, offered 5 first seconds of the conversation for free.
From that moment onwards (for at least another year) all my friends got highly specialised in the conversations that lasted 4 to 5 seconds. We even copied our physic homework from one another using 5 seconds calls.
But of course you were doomed to made mistakes and miscalculations! - I answer before you ask - Especially when drunk.
I remember my friend's father saying to him: If you got so many 6s in the Lotto, we would be bloody billionaires!
However most of the bills I saw at that time, followed the pattern: 665 phone calls, duration of each of them 5 seconds, 0 PLN to pay. The scheme was scrapped very fast.

As the phones became smaller, more colourful and multifunctional, everyone jumped on the band wagon of the digital technology. Forget about the mobile phone that serves it's purpose, i.e making a phone calls. It also had to have a calendar, a note pad, a camera, a voice recorder, games, WAP and so on.
Before the era of smart phones even begun, the book sellers in South Korea reported a massive dip in sales, correlated with the wide-spread of phones with digital cameras. What's the point of buying, if you can just sit down with your coffee and take photo page by page and then share with your friends on line or through MMS?

What is the future of mobile phones then?
I remember my 16-year-old friend begging her dad 13 years ago, to give her his own Alcatel and promising to pay him off from her pocket money. To which he answered:
Honey, by the time you would pay me off, there would be such phones that you don't even require to dial the number. You think about calling and you are calling already.

You can think this is far fetched, but I seriously think that this is the future. More and more technological integration in one device would lead to multi-operational technology that then would conjoin variety of functions. The size would become smaller and smaller and the prices will be lowered year by year. Not only for devices themselves but also for the access to the Internet and data transfer the prices here will steady decrease. There will be more chargeable services however.

Your multi-operational device will measure your bodily functions and send the alerts to your private medical companies who will automatically get onto your shared calendar and set up the appointment in the time suitable for your needs and condition. Several monitoring factors will be taken into account so that your device would easily know that you are running low on iron and will mention it next time you are making your shopping list with it. Everything that you see, feel or hear, can be automatically send and shared on any social network, if you so wish. And yes, you would be able to call and text as usual, but you would just have to say it, or think about it, as your braincells would be also used to operate your multi-operational not 'smart-phone'any more, but more like a 'genius phone'.
Just to give you an example.

Have you seen Futurama and the episode on eyePhone? Well, that in my opinion is not a distant future.

William Webb (The future of mobile phones: A remote control for you life - Magazines, Student - The Independent) argues that in around 10 to 15 years we would have a device that would replace many ordinary things that we now cannot think of leaving the house in the morning. The device that would actively engage and interact with our day-to-day routine, much more than just a communication device - more like a remote control for your life. You still call it a "mobile" from habit, but it is an organiser, entertainment device, payment device and security centre, all developed and manufactured by engineers.

On a typical day it will start work even before you wake. Because it knows your travel schedule it can check for problems on the roads or with the trains and adjust the time it wakes you up accordingly, giving you the best route into work. It can control your home, re-programming the central heating if you need to get up earlier and providing remote alerts if the home security system is triggered. It is your payment system - just by placing the phone near a sensor on a barrier, like the Oyster card readers in use on London transport, you can pay for tickets for journeys or buy items in shops. With an understanding of location, the mobile can also provide directions, or even alert the user to friends or family in the vicinity.

And I largely share this view.
But I think and strongly believe that the shift will happen in the way we are charging and powering our devices. And I am also convinced that the solution would be quite surprising, like charging your phone with the electrical impulses that your body produces of some totally out of the box innovation related to the new energy sources that would be implemented shortly before or after 2020.

But for now, sit back, relax, watch your TED or Youtube, chat with friends online, write a business e-mail, record your thoughts, play games, read a book, take some pictures on your smart phone and just wait for the future. The future that obviously is bright.