
Have we reached peak English in the world? - msangi
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/27/reached-peak-english-britain-china
======
diego_moita
No, not even close to that. English has 2 strengths very hard to overcome: it
is both "cool" and useful. And those strengths are increasing a lot, compared
to other languages.

There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is
the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and
Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language
of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this
brainwashing.

And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just
business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that:
it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and
Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to
learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries,
people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you
know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of
English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English.

Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are
"sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for
people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy
and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people
put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling
language.

~~~
wenc
> Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages"

When I was visiting Portugal I stayed with two people, one from Portugal and
the other from Spain. They had been living together for months before I joined
them, and speaking to each other in their native languages.

I was a unilingual Anglophone, and to accommodate me, they both spoke English
in my presence. It was only through the medium of English that they discovered
that they had misunderstood each other for months about various things.

The fact that Spanish and Portuguese were similar lulled them in to a false
sense of comprehension, when in fact there are many false friends (cognates)
and divergent nuances.

I'm told this happens a lot among Scandinavians too, and Danish is known to be
especially difficult for Norwegians and Swedes to comprehend completely, so
many fall back on English to avoid misunderstandings.

~~~
larsiusprime
Norwegian here, can confirm. I can speak to Swedes pretty easily with them in
Swedish and I in Norwegian. Danes, despite the fact our languages are
_written_ about the same, are really hard to understand in speech. It's much
easier to just switch to English.

Going further, I've found that the mainstream Swedish dialect is probably more
mutually intelligible with the mainstream Norwegian dialect than some of the
more obscure regional Norwegian dialects (and I say this as someone who grew
up speaking one of those regional dialects).

------
adrianN
This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted
forever before".

I really doubt that English will be supplanted by Chinese, Chinese is way too
hard to learn and they have an irrational fondness of their horrible writing
system. The best the Chinese can probably hope for is the emergence of some
kind of Pidgin that is easier to pronounce for them and contains more Chinese
loanwords. The world will never learn their characters.

~~~
coldtea
> _This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted
> forever before"._

Not many other arguments are needed. But it does offer another argument -- or
at least implies it: the world where English speaking powers loomed large is
now changing. Previous peripheral countries and market emerge -- China, India,
and so on. Even inside the US, Spanish is growing faster than ever.

So while English might not be "supplanted by Chinese", it will be supplanted,
either by a more balanced mix of languages playing more major roles (English,
Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc), so by a mixed-up patois style dialect -- as
predicted by some sci-fi films long ago, and as lived in many multicultural
places like Singapore.

~~~
adrianN
There are more arguments needed if you want to show that we're at _peak_
English right now. India has English as an official language for example and
is growing rapidly.

------
Viliam1234
It is all about "what language do I need to learn to have a good income". The
difficulty of language matters little, as long as speaking the language badly
is still more profitable than not speaking it at all.

That is partially about economic power (if your country offers many good jobs,
people near you have an incentive to learn your language), and partially about
military power (if you can make another country speak your language at
gunpoint, at least in government-related jobs, _their_ economical power
becomes another argument for learning _your_ language).

Therefore the popularity of Chinese will depend on how easy it will be for
people who learn Chinese to increase their income. Compared with the expected
increase of income from learning English.

Argument "but most important people in China speak English anyway" is less
relevant if learning Chinese provides you even better advantage from
cooperating with them. For example, most people in Germany speak English, but
I suppose that being fluent in German still makes it easier to find a job in
Germany.

~~~
cm2187
So you have to learn German to work better in Germany, and French in France.
You can list every country like that. But if you want to work with anyone in
the world with one language, that's english. And that's its power, the new
latin.

I can see some people learning a specific language because they plan to work
with/in a specific country but I can't think of any language that seriously
rivals english as a universal language.

~~~
vixen99
German, French, English and Latin.

------
eloff
I can't disagree with this more strongly. Not only is it a useless opinion
piece with not a bit of data to support the conclusions drawn, but I'm certain
it's dead wrong to boot.

English is the beginnings of a global language. The language of human beings,
rather than just the language of a particular culture or nationality. More
people speak English than any other language. More people are learning English
as second language than any other language. It's the defacto language of
international business, the sky, the sea, of science, of movies, television,
and games, and most importantly of the internet itself. There is more
information available on any topic, in English, on the internet than any
other. To the point that if you don't know how to search in English and read
in English, you're at a serious information disadvantage. This is why for
software developers, where information is king, English is the lingua franca.

Look at us, here we are people from all over the world, and we're all
communicating in English because it's the common denominator.

It has little to do with the relative economic power of England and America at
this point. In terms this group will relate to - English has stronger network
effects going for it than any other language - and I expect its importance to
only increase going forward.

------
pimmen
Too much pop culture outside of the US is produced in English even though it's
consumed mostly by non-english speaking markets. Swedish music, for example.
And lets not forget that software engineering's lingua franca is still
English, regardless of where the finished product will be consumed.

China might supplant the US as _the_ consumer market but it will take a long
time for the rest of the world to adapt to its language. Japanese, German and
Russian doesn't even hold a candle to English dominance during the 20th
century even though the German and Japanese economy were going very strong and
the Soviet Union had a very powerful presence. Even in Finland English edged
out Russian.

~~~
hsivonen
How you mean "even in Finland" and "edged out"? Finland resisted Russification
when under Russian rule and was more on the Swedish and German language orbit
before English took over after WWII.

~~~
pimmen
Because after WWII Finland was very influenced by the Soviet Union. Finland
tried to avoid enacting or supporting policies that opposed the Soviet Union
during the cold war, especially during the first half when the USSR was
Finland's largest market.

There's even a word for it, "Finlandization", which means not upsetting the
super power right next door even though you secretly really don't like it.

But since Finland wanted to have access to the global, capitalist market
English was the way forward. I don't think national pride made them break away
from the Soviet sphere of influence it was money, and English is still the
language of global business. Until the opportunity cost of learning some other
language than English for your field is too big countries will most likely
stick with English.

------
cobbzilla
English is a lot like x86: yeah it's got a lot of warts but it's ubiquitous
and fairly simple to learn the basics.

~~~
darklajid
The biggest problem English has in my opinion is that you can't guess what a
word is pronounced like..

~~~
russellbeattie
That's its primary strength as well, as it means that English can adopt a word
from any other language and expand without causing any linguistic issues. Most
languages are stunted by their formality and rules, but English is already a
mongrel. We're happy to import tortilla, hors d’oeuvre, origami, sheikh,
schadenfreude and hundreds of other words without a thought, as well as make
up new ones on a yearly basis (vape, selfie, etc.). Not many other languages
are so flexible, as frustrating as it may be.

Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking
countries.

~~~
flukus
> Fun fact: There are no such things as "spelling bees" in Spanish speaking
> countries.

Not so surprising, this is a uniquely american thing~, there is no such thins
as spelling bees^ in the rest of the anglosphere either.

~ It's probably bleeding out to the rest of the world now.

^ "spelling bee" itself has an interesting etymology:
[http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-
bee](http://spellingbee.com/origin-term-spelling-bee)

edit - how the hell do you escape an asterix on HN?

~~~
majewsky
You don't. Most people use bracketed numbers for footnotes, or obscure
characters like †.

Also, it's called "asterisk". Asterix only needs to escape from the Romans. ;)

~~~
Freak_NL
> […] or obscure characters like †.

The 'dagger' also called 'obelisk'¹. There's a double dagger (‡) if you need
another footnote, but yeah, they're not as versatile as just using numbers.

1: Not to be confused with Obelix: Asterix' chubby friend the Romans are
usually (vainly) trying to escape from.

------
realusername
Languages come and go, up until WWI, French was the global language. Only 50
years ago, knowing Russian was a massive asset and the language reached a lot
of countries. Now English is the undisputed main one but there's indeed no
guarantee it will stay that way, who knows what the future will be made of.

~~~
icebraining
My parents' generation never used French to the same degree that we use
English today, though. Its marketing machines (such as Hollywood) are
tremendous.

~~~
paganel
In these parts of the world (Romania, Eastern-Europe, granted, a very
Francophile country back in the day) middle-class people were regularly using
French as the means of personal communication in the inter-war period. Just
recently I’ve seen a post-card sent by a Romanian husband to his Romanian wife
from a Romanian seaside resort sometime around 1930 which was written entirely
in French. Lots of first names were also being French-ified for written
informal communication, like the Romanian Gheorghe being changed into the
French Georges. Once the communists came to power after WW2 almost all of that
vanished, partly because the newly arisen middle-classes were not as
“cultured” as the inter-war middle-class (even though knowing French was still
seen as you being “an intellectual”, so to speak).

Once the communists fell and capitalism took over English sort of became
lingua-franca for business communication, but you’d be hard-pressed to find
any people using it for personal communication the same as they were using
French before WW2. Not trying to refute your observation or anything, which I
find entirely correct, just wanted to add a small piece of language trivia.

~~~
icebraining
Oh, no doubt about that; in Portugal our middle and upper classes were knee
deep in French language and culture. One of our best writers wrote a lengthy
text humorously complaining that "Portugal was a country translated from
French".

But this was still a small minority, even if influential, and even there
actually knowing how to speak French wasn't universal.

------
pretendscholar
Im still hoping a constructed language like esperanto takes the mantel but
that is such a pipe dream.

~~~
tomcooks
I think the world is more likely to end up using a simplified mashup of most
used languages rather than a new one, especially Esperanto with all its
faults.

~~~
jsnider3
Sounds like interlingua.

------
100k
The author of this article wrote a very interesting book about the connection
between language and empire, "Empires of the Word".

[https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-
World/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-
World/dp/0060935723)

It is really interesting to read about how languages outlast their cultures.
Latin comes to mind of course, but as the book discusses this was also the
case with Sumerian and others.

------
bartart
I hope this will matter less (if it even matters now) once automatic
translation of web pages gets good enough and those google auto translate
earbuds actually start to work

~~~
100k
The author makes the argument that automatic translation could prevent the
rise of a new lingua franca: [https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-
English-Return/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-
Return/dp/0802717713)

------
exodust
> "Chinese, too, is great."

What an awkward way to end the article. What does he mean? Is he telling us
his opinion of the language with one word, "great"?

Perhaps as an afterthought he added that line in case anyone wondered whether
he thought the language was "great" or "not great", so he's kindly cleared up
any confusion about that!

------
oceanman888
At the moment, the kind of Chinese you would want to talk to, almost always
speaks English.(Except when you are sourcing parts in Shenzhen)

~~~
thaumasiotes
My exposure to Chinese people is heavily biased towards (1) highly educated
youth who (2) feel like talking with foreigners. Despite that, it's very clear
that this extremely selected population displays the full range of English
ability, from native-level proficiency through near-total inability to speak
or understand.

Drop down to students at a merely second-tier university, or people a little
older, or top-tier students who don't bother to approach foreigners because
they know there's no hope, and you'll find people with even less English than
that.

~~~
oceanman888
Not considering Chinese who spend majority of his life outside of china, Ones
overall competence correlates with the mastery of English. Bad English means:
My parents neglected or could not pay for good education. Sadly this is some-
what true for this generation.

~~~
thaumasiotes
Correlates, yes. But one of the best students I've met, who in a mock visa
interview answered the question "it costs a lot of money to live in America.
Can you afford it?" with "we have a hundred million RMB", was basically unable
to function in conversation. (In the same interview, which was meant to be
conducted in English, more than three quarters of her responses were just
"什么意思？".)

Some people aren't interested in learning languages. Some people have
tremendous difficulty.

------
mistrial9
I see plenty of talk here about a "world" or dominant spoken language, and
nothing so far about the extinction of viable languages now.. how quick people
are to pile on to commonality .. many possible things to say but leave it
there for now

------
zwieback
I vote for English as a global standard everywhere and also ASCII only. We
never really needed more, bye bye umlauts, dreierle-S, emojis and all that.

------
tomcooks
Side note rant on languages: the fact that on Duolingo there are more people
willing to learn made up languages like Klingon or High Valyrian, rather than
Arabic, says a lot about how invested many anglophones are about opening up
towards other cultures.

Hopefully peak English has been reached.

~~~
krageon
I don't understand why you would pick Arabic as an example here. There are
languages you could take as alternatives to the mentioned fantasy languages
(Mandarin, German if you read a lot of technical literature, etc) that are
significantly more relevant and likely to be useful online.

~~~
tomcooks
Surely the Arab world has no use online, especially lately /s

