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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
This article offers no arguments other than "global languages never lasted forever before".<p>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.
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.<p>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, <i>their</i> economical power becomes another argument for learning <i>your</i> language).<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>China might supplant the US as <i>the</i> 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.
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.
The author of this article wrote a very interesting book about the connection between language and empire, "Empires of the Word".<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/dp/0060935723" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Empires-Word-Language-History-World/d...</a><p>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.
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
> "Chinese, too, is great."<p>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"?<p>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!
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
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.<p>Hopefully peak English has been reached.