Brandon Crossadded a note 7 лет назад

I’ve had many people tell me over the years that Chinese was poised to give English a run for its money in terms of being the world’s next great ‘lingua franca’.

Side note - according to most definitions, a lingua franca is a language used to communicate between people who speak different languages natively.

Yet if we use this definition of ‘lingua franca’, and keeping in mind that it is estimated that around 1.5 billion people use English as a second language (with the number set to increase in the coming years), we can easily see that English definitely takes the top spot, but in my opinion, for reasons that you might not think.

Although Chinese (all Chinese varieties) has more native speakers (900mln) than English (339mln), English definitely more than compensates for this lack of native speakers by the number of second language speakers (603mln), and if we add in the number of second language speakers of Chinese (190mln), we get a total of just over a billion speakers of Chinese (all varieties- 1,090mln) and just under a billion speakers of English (942mln).

In addition to the MANY reasons why Chinese will never become a global lingua franca (of course Mandarin is the lingua franca of all Chinese varieties), based on how difficult it is to access certain popular sites due to government censorship, this language won’t be going ‘viral’ anytime soon.

The world communicates online now and China’s great firewall has contributed to US companies dominating global online activity. Everyone outside of China can’t get enough of Twitter, YouTube, Google and Facebook – and knowledge of English is a key skill in accessing a huge wealth of information.

Meanwhile, the Chinese internet community is mostly talking to itself behind the firewall. And by the time this firewall is taken down, the global conversation will be even more firmly entrenched in English.

So, these are just my own personal views of why I think English will dominate for at least another 50-100 years. I would not be against another language dethroning English, but for now, I think English shall reign supreme)))

What’s your take on the situation? Do you agree? Disagree? Or do you think the next lingua franca is neither one of these languages and another will spring up and surprise us all?))