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.