The study predicts the following changes in 40 years:
* a 20% drop in the use of Mandarin
* a 38% drop in the use of English
* a 17% increase in the use of Spanish
* a whopping 167% increase in the use of French
Hmm, hmm. Yeah, no. Don't learn French. If you already know English, learn Spanish. It's easier to learn, the grammar is gentler, it's widely used, people who speak it tend to be a little more relaxed when it gets mangled by the rest of us....
(Full disclosure: French is so close to a mother tongue for me it's not even funny, and is a mother tongue, along with English, for my daughter. Spanish is my third strongest language, much stronger than the few others I've learned and sort of lost.)
Mexico will be the 7th economy in the world by 2050, Spain and Argentina 15th and 20th respectively.
In the US 1/4th of the population will be Hispanic in 2050, although this doesn't mean that 1/4th of the population will be Spanish native speakers, at least promises a high level of Spanish proficiency, source:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/16/with-fewer-n...
"French will be present on all continents, and particularly predominant in a continent that, by 2050, should be a fast-growing economic powerhouse–Africa". I find this very hard to imagine. Anyway, "en 2050 je serai dans la tombe".
The influence of a language is not determined by the number of its speakers, but their power and cultural influence. Given the myriad challenges facing sub-Saharan Africa, it is unlikely to give French much more influence even in 2050, which is just one generation away from now.
The only possibility is if sub-Saharan Africa can pull off the feat of China (lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in one generation), but with much less supporting global economic and environmental climate, and questionable governance institutions. Altogether, the chance is slim.
(Also, even the projected 750 million speakers by 2050 will likely be smaller than the number of Hindi speakers then.)
"The study’s methodology is somewhat questionable, since it counts as French-speakers all the inhabitants of countries where French is an official language, which probably won’t be the case. And almost certainly, as a second language, English will remain the lingua franca"
Sounds like the study measures colonial vestiges and not real world usage.
> French will be present on all continents, and particularly predominant in a continent that, by 2050, should be a fast-growing economic powerhouse–Africa
6 years ago, Rwanda changed its language medium in schools from French to English, and more French Union African countries may follow. Virtually every African I meet from a French Union country speaks English just as well. If there's any sudden decline in world population in the next 35 years, it will probably be in sub-Saharan Africa. Mandarin's making inroads in Africa with the huge influx of Chinese workers there over the past 20 years.
Oh the languages again. Many people don't know that it was the US, and not the UK, who mostly contributed to the spread of English -- of course one might argue that US talk English in first place due to the UK. That world-wide'fication started after the WWII. In Europe, for instance, the number of students learning English as first foreign language only surpassed French ones by the 50s and 60s in most countries (sorry, can't point now to the document in which I saw this info).
Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.
We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).
No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.
wodenokoto, don't get me wrong. I'm not even a native English speaker, let alone an US or UK citizen. But this issue is just overwhelming.
I recon that Asian countries, not only Japan and China, but also India, for example, are not so exposed to US as Europe, or America (continent) or Africa. I guess this has as much of cultural as historical -- for instance, Japan has always been a pretty much isolated culture historically speaking.
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 40.6 ms ] thread* a 20% drop in the use of Mandarin
* a 38% drop in the use of English
* a 17% increase in the use of Spanish
* a whopping 167% increase in the use of French
Hmm, hmm. Yeah, no. Don't learn French. If you already know English, learn Spanish. It's easier to learn, the grammar is gentler, it's widely used, people who speak it tend to be a little more relaxed when it gets mangled by the rest of us....
(Full disclosure: French is so close to a mother tongue for me it's not even funny, and is a mother tongue, along with English, for my daughter. Spanish is my third strongest language, much stronger than the few others I've learned and sort of lost.)
Mexico will be the 7th economy in the world by 2050, Spain and Argentina 15th and 20th respectively.
In the US 1/4th of the population will be Hispanic in 2050, although this doesn't mean that 1/4th of the population will be Spanish native speakers, at least promises a high level of Spanish proficiency, source: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/16/with-fewer-n...
If I could bet I'd put my money on Spanish.
Mandarin is hard to learn, period. Even if you're born and raised in China and it's the only language you know, it still takes a long time to learn.
No need to single out the Westerners :)
The only possibility is if sub-Saharan Africa can pull off the feat of China (lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty in one generation), but with much less supporting global economic and environmental climate, and questionable governance institutions. Altogether, the chance is slim.
(Also, even the projected 750 million speakers by 2050 will likely be smaller than the number of Hindi speakers then.)
Sounds like the study measures colonial vestiges and not real world usage.
no, really
6 years ago, Rwanda changed its language medium in schools from French to English, and more French Union African countries may follow. Virtually every African I meet from a French Union country speaks English just as well. If there's any sudden decline in world population in the next 35 years, it will probably be in sub-Saharan Africa. Mandarin's making inroads in Africa with the huge influx of Chinese workers there over the past 20 years.
Why was it so massive? Due the huge world-wide US influence associated with the mass communication that was being established as mainstream by that time. It were the movies, the TV shows, the music. On tech it were the electronics, then computer science and then internet. Suddenly it was a snowball: the aeronautics, the navigation, the research papers, the international treaties, you name it... all in English.
We've got to a point where if a given music is in its original language, it runs the risk of being mostly unknown, but if it's translated to English, it might be a huge success (see Claude François's Comme d'habitude vs Frank Sinatra's My Way, just to name one).
No language can ever surpass English until all this shifts to that language, and that's very unlikely to happen. US made it big at the right time, now it's too late change that.
If you make your music in English you run the risc of being mostly unknown in the second d and third largest economies in the world.
I recon that Asian countries, not only Japan and China, but also India, for example, are not so exposed to US as Europe, or America (continent) or Africa. I guess this has as much of cultural as historical -- for instance, Japan has always been a pretty much isolated culture historically speaking.