Will another language replace English as the dominant language in the near future?

I've come across similar articles before. I honestly don't mind if English isn't the most popular language. I'm really not attached to it. It's actually quite a horrible language.

 

I think those statistics may be a bit off. Isn't Arabic in the top 10? I thought it was. I'll try and see if I can get a legit source.

 

In the post it states Arabic would be around 5th but since it has so many dialects they were counted separate.

 

English is still widely spoken and most important in commercial use, and I think in the future it won't be so different. Sure we have an emerging Chinese population which is becoming a world power but English is still the language most widely used and the language that is mostly studied( Europeans often pick English as their second language, though most are muntilingual). The Chinese themselves are learning English, there are more English speakers in China then anywhere else in the world. China has really been influenced by the dominance of English..perhaps becoming a major language in their country? Now a days a lot of developing countries are also focusing on English..if anything English will not loose it's power but as More powerful nations emerge, they will be looking for people who can speak different languages, the world is so competetive that speaking only 1 language is not enough, the more you know the better.

 

English is efficiently confusing.

 

aah, i see, that makes sense, see this is what happens when i just glance, sorry

 

I don't think any language is going to replace English as the most dominant global language anytime soon. The reason for this is that no other language is nearly as spread out as English. Take Mandarin for example, it is the language spoken by the most people but it's not spread out as evenly as English. In order for a language to become dominant in the world, it must be global. Also, if you look at Spanish and Hindi, they both have very high numbers of speakers, but again, they are not as evenly spread out. It's all part of globalization as well. I can see a different language becoming more dominant than English globally one day, but I doubt this would happen in any of our lifetimes.

 

If I had my druthers, we would all speak French. But that's only because I like the way it sounds, not necessarily for efficiency.

 

Not to mention that even though Spanish its widely spoken, it has very little economic influence(Most Spanish speaking countries are developing nations). Even though India is developing rapidly, it still has not reached a status comparable tot he US, not to mention Hindi is to eccentric(spoken mainly inside the country and has a lot of religious root) which is why English is being spoken in India often. China is becoming a world power and might get many people interested in learning it but the fact that China has so many English speakers, that English is already global and well let's face it English is a much easier language to learn all plays a key role even if it might not seem like it does.

 

I think it'd be fun if we all spoke lojban, but I'm far too lazy to actually learn it.

 

So very true. Great points raccoon!

 

Chinese isn't quite as good when it comes to science or anything technical in my opinion. Every time you have a completely new concept, you're basically forced to create new alphabet(s) so it the term itself can be represented.

You can see the problems this creates as the in English you could still read the word and say the word without knowing the definition. In this case for Chinese, it is possible for a person to not know the definition but also not know how to say the word itself.

English is a better platform for technical thought as the alphabet remains the same. Since the world in it's current stage is highly technocratic and specialized, you could see why English is the dominant force.

 

Good point, Quinlan.

Both Chinese and English are analytic languages which means they don't motivate you to construct your own words based on principles, but to choose from many already existing words; and also since each word can be interpreted in multiple ways, those languages are ambiguous, best suited for trading (and deceit), not science.

All languages are formed by random factors and of course are far from being efficient and precise.

I doubt English will get replaced by Chinese or Hindi, but languages may slowly die out in everyday use, as we move towards completely visual/audio realistic communication.

Many of the abstractions of languages have caused more damage to people than they have been useful. We talk about a lot of things that don't exist. We mostly need abstraction, really, in formal languages like mathematics, which help to extract precise information, unavailable directly.

 

It isn't if you know how to understand context.

 

Only 508 million that have English as their first or second language?

Faulty stastistic to say the least

 

Judging from all the mexicans going into the southern states, I'm saying it could be spanish.