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Sun 31 Oct, 2004 03:02 am
what do you think will be the dominant languages of the future?
do you all think english is the lingua franca of the world?
is mandarin chinese going to rise as a major language?
are french and russian, the old languages of colonizers, losing ground?
is spanish going to compete with english thanks to its demography?
what about portuguese?
discuss all that and more:)
Hmmm. Certainly Chinese has the weight of numbers - but historically they are an insular society, who look down on outsiders.
I was going to say Hindi might be an option (I think India's population is to surpass China's in the second decade of this century) but I'm reasonably sure English is the ruling class's lingua franca in India anyway. So some version of English will hang around for a couple of centuries.
Personally I think Spanish will be number 2, and at some point it will merge with English anyway. English being the ultimate magpie of languages.
So yep English to survive but to be as different from what we speak as Chaucer is to us.
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