Dec
26
Languages in the year 2300
Ever wonder what the world’s top languages will be in the future? Well, Steven Roger Fischer, a world-reknown linguist, has looked into his crystal ball and has made a prediction. There will only be three languages currently in use that will still exist 300 years from now. They are: Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English. We’ve got the last two covered. Learning Chinese, well, that will have to wait. Maybe in the next lifetime.
Personally, I find Dr. Fischer’s conclusion shocking, but in his book, “A History of Language”, Dr. Fischer lays it all out. Because of technology and the influence of the media, more languages are becoming extinct or less widely spoken, giving rise to even more influence and power of currently widely spoken languages.
An example is the language of Easter Island in South America. Thanks to the reach of Chilean television, Spanish is stamping out the local language of the people of Easter Island in a relatively short period of time.
Dr. Fischer says that only Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and English have a large enough group of speakers to guarantee that those languages will still be widely in use in the year 2300. Regarding other languages, Dr. Fischer writes: ”Smaller, rich societies (such as Japan, Germany, France, Italy and others) might be able to retain their tongues as local vestiges for several hundred years more, for cultural reasons.”
Another great reason to keep studying Spanish, don’t you think?
What’s your opinion of Dr. Fischer’s prediction? Can you imagine a world in which Russian, Arabic and Japanese are niche languages?
I believe Dr. Fischer’s prediction is too timid. I would argue that there will be only one language, not three, and by the end of this century, not in three hundred years. That language is likely to be a degraded form of English, with thousands of loan words and turns of phrase gathered from the debris of the rest. It won’t be attractive, but will serve the needs of a post-literate age in which all tastes, mores, and livelihoods will have been thoroughly homogenized.
Steve, you are definitely on to something. Have you ever heard of the term “Global English”? It’s a stripped-down utilitarian English that may sound stilted and awkward to a native English speaker but works well between non-English speakers who need to communicate. For example, the English spoken between a Chinese person and an Indian. It may sound overly technical and unnatural to a native English speaker and the verbs might not be conjugated correctly but it gets the job done in terms of communicating between people who have no native language in common.
I quoted David Graddol, a British linguist, on my other blog about this topic a while back:
“Native-speakers are becoming less relevant as English becomes an integral part of basic education in many countries. In many parts of Asia, the goal is to achieve proficiency, not fluency in English and the use of native speakers as English teachers is no longer considered a necessity.” Graddol says that the presence of native English speakers can actually hinder communication when English is being used as a universal language amongst people whose native language is not English. “In organizations where English has become the corporate language, meetings sometimes go more smoothly when no native speakers are present. This is not just because non-native speakers are intimidated by the presence of a native speaker. Increasingly, the problem may be that few native speakers belong to the community of practice which is developing amongst lingua franca users.”