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While English might be the language of "our time", I wonder for how long? With China's expansion and their almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin, I am wondering whether in the next 20 years we'd see a shift towards people learning Mandarin instead of English.

"We should adopt English and move on; majority of people know it and study it. Why regress?" - Sorry but I have to disagree here. While I think it is important to study English, I am not convinced it would be a great idea to abandon other languages in favor of it. Languages are part of a culture and it's traditions. Abandoning the language might lead to a progressive death of certain cultural aspects of one's identity and that wouldn't be progress, imho, that would be the exact opposite.



Due to not having an alphabet and being tonal I highly doubt Mandarin is ever going to be the lingua Franca. It's just too hard for non native speakers to learn.


That's a drawback when you're catching up but an advantage when you are ahead!


> almost 2.5 billion of people speaking Mandarin

Where are you getting that number? Ethnologue [1] claims 1.1B speakers, 1B of which live in China, 0.9B being native speakers.

[1] http://www.ethnologue.com/21/language/cmn/


Unfortunately it was from the top of my head, and I should have checked beforehand. Thanks for correcting me!




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