8 replies to this topic

[tubefuture]

Languages. They make all civilizations unique in a way. But one day eventually it will become a single dialect. To find out what that language will be like think about the modern languages.

Rule 1: Populace
The populace of languages today is what will affect our languages in the future. With that comes Mandarin; The Chinese will have a large infulence on language, since soon they will become the worlds next superpower! Latin-based languages are the most common of all. All western language is based on the language of the acient Romans. That means that the future languages will be greatly based on Mandarin and Latin-based languages.

Rule 2: Learning easiness
Languages like Mandrin and Hungrian are the worlds hardest. But that also means the future language will probbaly have a large amount of French and Italian bases since they are the easiest learnable Latin-based languages.

Here are my predicted percentages for a average language in a few hundred years time
25% Mandarin
30% English
35% Latin-based languages
10% Others

So our language will be a mainly European-based language plus the extra Asian! Our language will have a fair amount more than English today! It will be considerately hard to learn needing at least 25 years of learning to master it! How would you expect to learn THAT!

Edited by tubefuture, 18 June 2012 - 12:52 PM.

[Time_Traveller]

I think the three main languages in the future will be Spanish, Mandarin and English i would expect.

Edited by Time_Traveller, 20 June 2012 - 08:26 AM.

[Immortal]

today the world's most spoken language is mandarin, so it will be more like English and mandarin who will be spoken the most.

[eacao]

mandarin has become the worlds largest first-language. Superseded english now. English is still the most widely spoken language (1.8 billion english speakers comparing to 1.02 billion mandarin), but as a first language, mandarin is more common (850 million compared to ~400 million).

[MarcusAurelius]

Mandarin might be the most spoken first language but its going to take a long long time before its adopted as an official language of trade and diplomacy. Only China speaks it right now and not even in most of its territories. For instance right now Hong Kong (arguably its biggest commercial hub) doesn't speak Mandarin, but Cantonese. This cosmopolitan city is the gateway to the west for most Chinese industries and corporations. If they can make it in HK they stand a pretty good chance making it abroad too. But there is a heavy resistance among Hong Kongers to not embrace Mandarin so readily. Its largely for cultural reasons as mainlanders are mostly looked down upon as the unrefined and unruly big brother to HK. Spanish on the other hand has a greater chance of surviving well into the future as over 400 million people across South, Central and North America speak it. There are over 50 million spanish speakers in America alone, which rivals the mother country of Spain populationwise (47-50million)

http://articles.lati...spanic-20110325

[kjaggard]

Well that depends on the people with the biggest international and technological influence doesn't it. It the courtly age it was french that became... lingua franca if you will. In the founding empires period, the military, religion and engineering of Rome Left a Latin Legacy that holds sway even today in much of science. Before that was greece with still some legacies worldwide. And before that Assirian and Babylonian were likewise used long after the founding empires expired.

There is a prestegious aspect of using a nononative language to refer to things. But also a factor of a languages ability to have a catalouge of terms for the discoveries made in the time of it's dominance of discoveries and philosophies that carry forward.

Should China become a democracy it would be called a democracy, Hou Toa. Terms in mandarin have had language absorbtion with things like Hun Ku which is the mandarin for Very followed by the character Ku which is used for the american term cool. Instead of Xia Tien for a parting phrase as is traditional madarin it's bye bye to many of the you people I've known working with a large number of chinese students studying in america. I actually had to really try and get them to think of ways that weren't clearly recent adoptions into the language for some of those things, eventually I had to resort to research and trial and error.

We have some of it too though. Long time, no see; is a word for word translation for a Mandarin phrase.

The advantages of english are: 1)Between the UK, India, New Zealand, America, and Canada. Four first world countries with large sections on tech influance and cultural and phylisophical influance on the world and Indias rising influance in tech and manufacturing, it has a fairly cornered market in tech terminology. If people want to talk about or refer to aspects of an increasingly technological lifestyle they'll be using a lot of english terms. 2) English uses a lot of the latin and greek roots which are used in medical sciences and basic mechanics terminology. Again if people are talking tech or science they will be using terms used in english or english modifiers of those roots. 3) English while one of the more complex languages in existance for rules is extremely flexible and adaptable with a small finite number of characters able to be produced in a wide varieties of combinations to convey near infinite concepts. It lends itself well to puns and aliteration and well as ur B-N able 2 shrt-hnd things. As a means of communication it's very adaptive. (I asked a Columbian I used to work with about a word and she informed me that I was using the wrong gender based ending for the word to make sense, but the item was not a gendered object, but even then I'd have let it go accept "What about hermaphrodites and intersexed creatures? Do you force them to pick a side?" A language where something is either point one or point two and nothing else has obvious limits when the paradigm is broken and spectrums of values don't match their strict structure without breaking how the language functions.) 4) and English is not a a tonal language like many asian languages and it's alphabet is smaller and doe not require special mark to differenciate meanings (in pinyin mandarin is written with alphabetic scripts not idiographic symbols, but the term Ma has four meanings from old horse to hemp cord to mother and a means of designating a statment a question in some regions each is marked by a little dash whos direction indicates the tone of voice used for each) in some of the scripts found in india prior to the adoption of english as a language, there are symilar markings that change the meaning of a word by thier abscence or which ones are present. Rather like hebrew of old had now vowelsand thus some words could be identical with very differing meanings depending on context, eventually they added a system of dots to include a value marker for the vowel sounds following the letter, but that works only for vowels following letters what if a word starts with a vowel sound? Thus was born Aleph the letter that was a letter onto itself but most often made no sound, it was there to give a place to the first vowel sounds, and I've heard it used as a way of describing the spiritual concept of creation because in order for 'god' to create the world he needed to create the space into which it would go and thus he spoke into be aleph (the alpha, greek alphabet is based on the semitic language, and our alpha-beta is based off the romans which is based off the greeks which is based off the semitic).

In all probability The arab languages will cling hard to their languages there may be some merger but the very basis of non-interpretive and unchanging qualities in Muslim ideologies means that there will be a cluster of them around for near as long as there are people who conscider themselves Muslims.

Mandarin and Cantonese may mix or remain two seperate languages but Mandarin will make a mark of the world map of linguistic terms it creates and cultural influances around the world.

But I really do think that the differing aproaches to language will play a huge role. English will take up those new linguistic terms into the body of itself and just keep running. English is already a polyglot. I can see it becoming almost an omniglot. It would be the traders language and the scientist language. With bits of Pinyin mandarin and contonese throughout, The more common usages of the language would have more cultural based or regional based language in it.

It's also possible that there will be a language casting system. I could see Japanese being artistic phyiolosophy language, Mandarin being diplomatic, english being digital age tech, swiss/german being mechanical and engineering... ect. But as far as the international language I still think the polyglot flexable slang filled english language will comprise a good portion of it.

[tornado64]

I think english will be still the most important language. Mandarin is just too hard to learn, it will never become a world language. Most Chinese will learn english in the future...Spanish is also very important. But I don't think we will speak only one language around the world merged from other languages together. When we'll ever have one language it will be some kind of english language.

[TetrisAttack]

English will remain the most important language for a long time. It helped that both the British Empire and the American Empire spoke the same language. But more importantly, English was the dominant language at a time when the world started to get smaller via globalization, widespread air travel, the internet, etc. I don't see that changing in our lifetime.

Spanish will continue to be important. 1) because it's the 2nd most common mother tongue and 2) because it's rapidly becoming more important in the US. @kjaggard - you mentioned gender in Spanish. I lived in Latin America for several years and some young people will use the @ symbol instead of -o or -a to show inclusion of both genders. ex amig@s instead of amigos or amigas. That's unofficial "internet Spanish," but I think it's interesting.

Mandarin might become the dominant world language at some point. Imagine a world where China is a first world country, Chinese tourists are everywhere, and developing countries are filled with Mandarin-language call centers. Mandarin might seem too hard to learn, but if the other option is unemployment, then we'll find a way to learn it. China will need to become much more powerful before that happens, but it's not impossible. It won't happen in our lifetime, though.

Edited by TetrisAttack, 20 June 2012 - 06:52 AM.

[Alric]

I think we will get language nanobots that can be injected into your head and give you the knowledge to speak any language you want, before all of the languages of the world merge into one. In which case it might be irrelevant which language becomes number one.