

Beyond English, the language of the future - rjknight
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/06/whats_the_language_of_the_future/singleton/

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bryanlarsen
The most salient point I got from the article: an increasing number of people
learning English are using it only to speak to others who do not speak it
natively. A couple of illustrations:

\- I have witnessed one student from Hong Kong and one student from Beijing
use English to bridge the gap between Cantonese and Mandarin (as well as pen &
paper).

\- My French is very poor, so the only people that I can converse with in
French are those with a really bad English accent. I can well imagine that
English is worse, what with its crazy spelling and idioms.

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wccrawford
I post and correct on a language exchange site. One day, one of my Japanese
friends there received a correction from someone with the worst English I have
ever seen on that site, including that of people learning English. She
immediately stated that she only wanted corrections from people who were
fluent in English, and asked that he not correct her entries any more.

He blew up. He claimed he WAS fluent.

After a huge row, it turned out that everyone in his village in China speaks
English like that and they are convinced they are fluent. I can only assume
that's because they use it with each other, and don't try to communicate with
people who are natively fluent.

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pugnusferreus
And that's why there's so many variant of English, including the broken ones.
Manglish (Malaysian English), Singlish (Singaporean English) and much more.

Though not biology, I think this is how language evolves. For example in
China, you have so many dialects (Hokkien, Teochew, Cantonese etc). And if you
drill down to a dialect itself there are slight differences. You can roughly
identify which part of province that person is from.

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zerostar07
If only it had a consistent pronounciation, speech recognition would be so
much more widely used.

~~~
nakkali_kuere
The scripts from India has very consistent reading or pronunciation system.

