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The world's most influential languages

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Re: The world's most influential languages

#41

Post by jcampbell1 »

hugh4life wrote: post #18
batista wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not the '60s - 90's anymore, when US had the stronghold on global cultural creation/consumption. There are many signs that this is starting to fade, and for huge masses of people it was never true in the first place. E.g Chinese people could not care less about english media and knowledge. But people wanting work in China/Asia might very well care about learning english.

Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony. Science, Tech, and Business is where it rules and it will never be displaced by any language currently on earth. A future constructed language may have a chance though.

> Movies and TV shows will be the least of English hegemony.

I disagree. Movies, TV, and Music are a powerful way to spread a language because it is a great content is the best way to learn a language, and pop culture attracts young people to the language at an age when it is realistic to learn another language.

Scandinavians tend to be excellent English speakers. One possible reason is that they don't dub TV there. Young people want to know English so they can talk about the cool tv shows and music, and they also get a ton of practice because they watch so much English TV.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#42

Post by Retric »

meric wrote: post #30

"It should be a sobering thought, however, to any triumphalist impulse that in 100 AD Latin looked set to dominate its slice of the world forever." The winner of the "Top Language of 100 AD" should go to Chinese circa 100 A.D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic The following languages are heavily influenced by written chinese: Korean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja Japanese http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji…

It really depends on how you define a language and a speaker. I have heard estimates that English is currently the most spoken language of all time. (at least on earth). With over half of the worlds population being familiar with at least a few words, 1.8 billion people with basic competency, and a steady trend of English words being adopted into most other living languages.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#43

Post by LoseThosMan »

This topic is stressing.

God says... C:\Text\WEALTH.TXT

e of their land and labour, would fall, and would be expressed or represented by a smaller quantity of silver than before; but their real value would be the same as before, and would be sufficient to maintain, command, and employ the same quantity of labour. As the nominal value of their goods would fall, the real value of what remained of their gold and silver would rise, and a smaller quantity of those metals would answer all the same purposes of commerce and circulation which had employed a great

Re: The world's most influential languages

#44

Post by rogerbinns »

Datonomics wrote: post #38
rogerbinns wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use wha…

There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

You would enjoy Bill Bryson's book Mother Tongue. At one point (several hundred years ago) English was going through a period of simplification and rationalization but it was also during that period that dictionaries, newspapers etc become popular. Consequently some words had already become consistent and some hadn't and we are somewhat stuck with poor timing. http://www.amazon.com/The-Mother-Tongue-English-That/dp/0380...

Esperanto is an attempt at a equal international language for all. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Because English and English speakers are happy to adapt and change, the simplification is happening. Look at text messaging where superfluous extra words and letters get dropped, as does case. Even Hollywood is careful to keep language simple in their popular movies aimed at a worldwide audience.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#45

Post by guard-of-terra »

hetman wrote: post #40
guard-of-terra wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When measured how? Data in a table at the bottom of the article is extremely stale - 2007! Russia now boasts the biggest Internet audience of all European countries. Add to that a formidable number of Russian speakers in other countries, and Russian surely outgrosses Korean and Italian on the Internet. (I am not sure that number of speakers online is the one and only measurement of "language usage on the Internet")

You seem to be talking about a "potential" audience. Statistics for actual usage is quite different.

Nope. It's actual monthly audience.

Got any (recent) data?

Re: The world's most influential languages

#46

Post by rogerbinns »

batista wrote: post #15
alister wrote: post #8

Looking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant? If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

> If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.) Well, not only that. English usage will also drop because of long term economic and cultural effects. English had commerce, hollywood and popular music going for it. But billions of people in emerging middle cla…

> ... get their own "hollywoods" and music on, and they also get at least equal footing in the world trade-ways (commerce).

And the way they do that is by including English. For example see the second paragraph of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood or consider the recent Korean pop success "Gangnam Style".

Re: The world's most influential languages

#48

Post by zik »

mbell wrote: post #35
zik wrote: post #31

I wonder about the credibility of this article given that it talks about "Chinese" as if it were a single language. There are many spoken languages in China (most notably Mandarin and Cantonese). They share a common written form but if you're talking about the "most influential language" surely the spoken languages should count for something.

Where do you draw the line? Is Latin American Spanish separate enough from Spain's Spanish? Is French different from Canadian French? American vs British English? Even southern US English vs northern US English? Being from the north and visiting the south regularly I can attest that its very difficult to understand the 'deep locals', granted its sort of a French-English creole. Northern German vs Southern German? I w…

Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages, not dialects of the same language.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#49

Post by hatu »

alister wrote: post #8

Looking at the advances in machine translation and speech recognition in the last 10 years, how long before fluency in English becomes irrelevant? If any English that you hear, see, or read is instantly and perfectly translated to your native language, and vice versa, then all languages get equal footing. (Except perhaps for some primitive languages.)

I'm not sure if Google Translate is cutting edge but I would imagine it's pretty close to that. For Finnish atleast it's not really any better than BabelFish was 10 years ago. You can get the gist of things most of the time but there are still huge errors and misunderstandings in anything that's not super-basic.

Re: The world's most influential languages

#50

Post by justincormack »

Datonomics wrote: post #38
rogerbinns wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect translation is going to be hard. For an everyday most common 5,000 words that may be ok but anything outside of that would require the invention of many new words when English likely already has them. They don't really mean anything in English either - for example "quantum mechanics" are just two words, and have to be learned even for English speakers. When coming from another language you may as well use wha…

There needs to be an international version of English designed so that it is simple to learn. For instance: one sound = one letter and all verbs conjugate the same.

There have been lots of attempts to reform English. There is also Simple English Wikipedia which just simplifies structure not pronounciation https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
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