I've heard that in the Netherlands, about 80%+ can speak English, and similar figures exist in Sweden and other countries. So, does this mean that a possibility might exist in these (and similar) countries that English could soon overtake the original languages? I'm asking this because I've heard that in Sweden that there are special schools that teach English as a priority, which is scary to me - I mean, in Melbourne in Aus there was a school that taught solely in French, but that was only one school and not a whole group of them.

In your opinions, is English really becoming a world language? What would happen to Esperanto? What do people from countries like the Netherlands and Sweden think?

My own opinion is that English and Spanish will start to form a creole language, that in time English will break off into daughter languages like Latin, and that a permanent world language will be impossible, and for that reason Esperanto and other auxlangs will still stay around.

*also on the note of creole languages, I was looking into this and I actually found a language called "Eurolengo", it seems little known or publicised though, which makes finding info about it hard.

Good idea about the collapse of a single English~
Yet be careful about creole language, because it is not as possible as before now that we have soundtrack available everywhere and of course, the net. These all help to stabilize the development of a language.

So although some minor adjustments in vocabulary happens every year, I don't consider a drastic change in basic grammar will occur any time soon...

Well, I think the Netherlands is the most at risking for losing its own language to English, but it's definitely not happening in the next 50 years. Everyone except for some Polish labourers and English-speaking immigrants speaks Dutch and the language is quite alive and evolving.

However, there are some worrying developments. Most master-level university courses are taught in English, and there are bilingual high schools and some English bachelor studies, one of which I'm in. By now if you do not speak English you're missing out on a lot of things, many advertising and slogans are in English, and of course the internet is English for a great part.

One of the results is that many people here are now suffering from an American disease: they think that because it's easy for to learn English, everybody in the world should understand it at least a little bit. Even though we have 4 years of French and English education in high schools, Dutch people will try to talk in English when they are in Germany or France.

But I think the Dutch language is in no serious danger as long as our news shows and parliamentary discussions are held in Dutch.

I've never worked much in the Netherlands, but I've spent a lot of time in Scandinavia. The general concensus there, which I agree with, is that the level of fluency in English is due more to television than to education. Swedes, Danes, and Norwegians tend to watch a lot of British/American TV shows which are not dubbed. They're left in the orginal English with subtitles. If you grew up watching shows in Russian with English subtitles, you'd probably speak fluent Russian, cxu ne?

What I find fascinating in Scandinavia, is when a Swede and a Dane get together to speak. Their languages aren't that far apart and they can understand each other to a certain degree. (Unless one of them is from Skane... HAHA just kidding. ) And yet, they choose to speak in English. At first, I always thought this was for my benefit since I speak neither. I later discovered that they do this even when I'm not around. I would love for someone to explain this phenomenon to me, if possible, because I find it pretty interesting.

As another aside, it worries me sometimes that English is the world's lingua franca. Firstly, I think it hurts my country in business relations. Our businessmen frequently rely on interpreters to conduct business overseas and we often don't know the interpreter's opinions or agenda. I could tell you some stories on this point. Secondly, the world has had many lingua franca in the past. If you look at the historical record, the vast majority of those are now dead languages. Is that the future of my mother tongue a few centuries down the road? I hope not. A lot of great literature and information has been collected in English. It would be a pity if only a few scholars would be able to read it.

ceigered:
My own opinion is that English and Spanish will start to form a creole language, that in time English will break off into daughter languages like Latin, and that a permanent world language will be impossible, and for that reason Esperanto and other auxlangs will still stay around.

I speak Spanish. I've just spent the better part of the last three weeks in Laredo, Texas for my job. Laredo is a border town between the US and Mexico, so 95% of the people there are bilingual.

The creole you're talking about is already forming. Many call it "Spanglish", but I've heard other names too. The people I was working with would switch between English and Spanish like they were changing a television channel and it didn't bother them at all. When I asked them if they were aware that they were using Spanish words in their English conversations, or English words in their Spanish conversations, they had one simple answer.

"--What are you talking about?--"

For example, Spanish has a perfectly fine word for parking a car:

estacionar - 'to park'

I heard quite a few people using the word

parcar - 'to park'?

I'm assuming that is what it meant because of the context.

It is also close to the word 'apacar' which means the same thing. However, people have begun to leave the 'a' off the beginning of the word.

'Puedo parcar mi coche aqui?' - May I park my car here?

I've seen it outside the border, too. In popular music, there was a very famous song about three years ago called "La Camisa Negra
" by Juanes. It was also a big hit in Europe, so I'm sure many of you have heard it. There is a line in the song:

"yo por ti perdi la calma
y casi pierdo hasta mi cama"

I would very roughly translate this as "I lost my calm over you and almost came to lose my bed."

Cama = "bed"

The very next line in the song is

"cama, cama, come on baby"

Before you start laughing, I understand that lines that this got the album banned in the Dominican Republic, but that isn't the point. Juanes is a fluent English speaker and I'm sure the aliteration was intentional. I've always wondered how Spanish speakers viewed this intrustion. Do the kids think it's "cool"? What about the adults? This was a huge song, so it is a worthwhile question.

Frankly, it all leaves me with a headache. Polyglot can be cool in small doses, but then it becomes annoying.

I have heard that spoken Danish is difficult for Swedes to understand, though written Danish is easy. I don't speak either, so this is just hearsay.

Border towns will always have creoles, and close languages will always influence one another. Quebec French has a lot of English loan words not found in France French.

Outside of border areas I think creoles will not really form. It's mainly Latin Americans and their US-born children that speak Spanglish around me (Washington DC). And a few Spanish words make it into colloquial English ("What's up, chica?") but it's very few, and not nearly enough to constitute a creole. I do not see English and Spanish merging in the US, in any kind of widespread manner. Parallel languages/dialects are already common here. For example, blacks and whites are not likely to speak with the same accent and grammar, even if they grew up in the same town and went to the same schools.

Hmmm..

Having trouble keeping my mouth shut on this one:

Our dear English will die. So will Russian and Acholi. Languages change, that`s all there is to it. It cannot be stopped. The only thing that saved Classical Latin is that it died! As we can clearly see by her daughter tongues... They share a tradition, but are far from Latin. In the future I`m sure scholars will study the languages of our day, but they will discuss it with their colleagues in a different tongue, and with their husbands and wives in a dialect thereof.

Just for clarification, neighbouring language borrowings are NOT creoles. All languages influence each other when in contact.

English has the word 'pure' from French; 'skirt' from Norse; 'glen' from Gealic; 'bazaar' from Farsi; 'pepper' from Greek; etc. (from Latin!), but is no creole.

Creoles come from pidgins.

Pidgins are simplified systems of speech that develop when two or more language groups are forced together.. usually to work for some fat bastard.
'Pidgin' means 'business.' Slaves were often thrown together from all over and made to work on the same boat, plantation,etc.

Pidgins are not languages but more like code or jargon devoted to a specific task. If you worked on a Banana farm, your Pidgin would have a word for Banana, Bananas, numbers, picker, tree, bugs, containers, supper, water, hate, enjoy, big fat boss man... stuff like that, but likely no word for whale, or a complicated verbal system.

A creole is a fully developed language. Children spontaneously develop creoles from the fragmented linguistic info found in pidgins. Like calling a whale "fat-boss-likes-water", or a beard "leaves-on-face." Kids immediately develop rules for such constructions, and new grammars form. One generation after a pidgin develops, a creole will develop. Grown ups do not create language. We don`t have the brains for it.

It happened most recently in Nicaragua with deaf people who used only home-signs unique to each individual and were then grouped together in a national institute for the deaf. (The government didn`t know what to do with them and thought they`d best try and teach them Spanish!)

The very young deaf children of Nicaragua spontaneously developed a fully fledged sign language from the sign-babble of the older teens at the institute.

Just like I spontaneously develop essays.

How Esperanto will develop is a curiosity for sure, as it is a different beast. But it will change if it is to live, and it will happen without our help.

Sorry about all the words.

I`ll try harder to stop early should I ever post again!

Perhaps I didn't make myself clear.

I don't dispute that languages are born and they die, and they develop far beyond what their original speakers can understand, and I have no doubt that English and Esperanto will follow this same path.

However, in the near-term (next couple hundred years) I don't really foresee a merger of English and Spanish. At least, not any more than they have already merged. The US has always had a mixture of speakers of many languages, and words from these languages have always entered English. English has hardly disappeared, however. Each wave of immigrants brings their language, and the immigrants mix it with English (Spanglish, Franglais, Yinglish, etc). And the immigrants assimilate and that's it. Pockets of the languages remain, whether it's creole French in New Orleans, or Pennsylvania German, but in my opinion, we are some hundreds of years away from any kind of major changes to English.

Sorry,

I`ve never posted anything on the internet until a week or so ago. I guess I`m not that good at it yet. I should use the citation thingy. I`ll give it a go below.

I read the thread (new word for me!) and thought I should clear up some stuff. I was responding to the theme of the entire thread, which seemed to me to be about language change and development.

The word creole was being misused. In America it often refers to a group of people, but who that is is debatable. Slaves, French Louisiana plantation owners, even Cajuns, and the dialects spoken by any of these people come under the umbrella, but linguistically, the word is much more narrow. Basicaly referring to a completely new natural language not a modified old one, or a con-lang like Eurolengo. The internet is so full of misleading info. (So are colleges!)

Each wave of immigrants brings their language, and the immigrants mix it with English (Spanglish, Franglais, Yinglish, etc

Yes, I think this is the strength of English don`t you? It`s so incredibly flexible. French did not have this type of forgiveness, which may have been one of the factors in it`s downfall as a lingua franca.

when a Swede and a Dane get together to speak. Their languages aren't that far apart and they can understand each other to a certain degree... And yet, they choose to speak in English

Ahh! Here they use English as we would have them use Esperanto. There is no pressure to learn the other`s language, no danger of one being lost to the other.

Where I live, the English can be unintelligible to speakers of the standard. And we must learn at least two dialects. We are in danger of being swallowed by Standard English in a way that the Swedes and Danes are not.

I beg to differ. In my humble opinion (is one allowed to type IMHO in these forums?), the main reason why English is used widely as "lingua franca", is the economic power of the English speaking countries, and more precisely, the US.

If Nepal had the economic power of the US, you can bet that Nepalese would be enforced as lingua franca, and almost everyone would demand us why we lose our time with Esperanto, given the evident advantages of Nepalese.

Regards,

Daniel

vejktoro:
Yes, I think this is the strength of English don`t you? It`s so incredibly flexible. French did not have this type of forgiveness, which may have been one of the factors in it`s downfall as a lingua franca.