[/quote]Now, before someone goes on the stulta "GO BACK HOME MEXICANS!" tangent, that Spanish linguistic behemoth in the US I believe is very closely related to the historical colonialism by Spain, so it shouldn't be a surprise. But funnily enough, it is in a way.[/quote]At some point, California and part of Texas were Mexican territory. So, Mexicans, feel entitled to reply "Pues, ya estoy en casa." (Well, I'm already home.)

[/quote]Good example! My question was where it would be strong as a second language. "South America" is only partly true because many countries there have Spanish as a first language.[/quote]Hmm, in that case, by personal experience, I would say that the U.S. west coast (especially California) is a strong Spanish hub. I have walked places in Los Angeles where stores and shops have billboards that read "Se habla inglés." (We speak English.)

Oops, my apologies on my last 2 replies. I don't know why the text failed to quote.

Do [ C I T = person's name ] text in here [ / C I T ]

without the spaces around what you want quoted to fix it.

@ Senegaùlo:

Well, only a world language . On population, Mandarin Chinese and English win hands down, more so Chinese. Spanish will always be after them though I suspect, provided English or Spanish don't split into separate languages (Mandarin Chinese by nature won't have to face that problem the same way).

(Then again, 1 out of 6 people are Chinese.)

(Volapük jönik! Löfob volapüki!)

I don't think it's true that the Chinese have no will to let us speak Chinese.

The Chinese government spends a lot of money to encourage foreigners to learn Chinese. They pay for Chinese teachers to go abroad and teach, and they fund institutes of Chinese language.

I think that Chinese is very learnable, but the writing system is of course extremely difficult.

I would love to study it myself but the older I get, the more I realize that there are only so many hours in a day. I can't do everything I want to do.

ceigered:provided English or Spanish don't split into separate languages

A language is a dialect with an army. (I just don't remember where I read that and who said that...)

In fact, on the English-language Wikipedia someone argued that (t)he dual use of UK and US English is primarily a compromise to allow two very similar languages to share one domain.

Senegaùlo, I cannot understand why you have the feeling that English is an unclear language. Yes, it's difficult and irregular, but unclear? I've never had such a feeling. I've been learning English since 2004, that was six years ago, and I think that I can make myself understood well enough (and my passive understanding is even better, I sometimes have to look up words, but that's all) - but well, I am generally relatively good at learning languages, so I might be different from the average person.

Uvi:

Miland:

erinja:Spanish is a huge language worldwide. Many people also speak it as a second language..

It's a big second language in the US, of course, and I imagine also the former Spanish colonies in Africa - Western Sahara, and the North coast of Morocco. Can you name any others?

Yes, the Philippines.

Ah, nope, we don't, we never did.

Senegaùlo:I thing putong hua is already splet in different languages united only by writing, and so is arabic...

You're half-right: for putonghua, it, by definition, cannot split up. The idea of "putonghua" is that it is the lingua franca and prestige dialect of what we historically call China. It's not like anything we've had in Europe, even though Latin came close in comparison. But standard Middle Chinese, the "Mandarin" of that era, did split up into what we call the chinese languages of today. However, Putonghua is still relatively the same all over China (there are pronunciation differences and differences in grammar, but no more and no less than there are in Esperanto).

Arabic though, I believe has "split up" already into some other languages. However, standard classical arabic will still exist as long as Islam exists, just how Latin exists in the Catholic church even though its daughter languages are the languages being spoken today, but Arabic is more important to the islamic faith just how Hebrew is more important to the jewish faith.

Even though it is much spoken the Chinese have no will to let us speak it and it would be almost impossible anyway...

Not impossible - mind you the current version of putonghua is pretty unfriendly to the rest of the world. It wouldn't surprise me if one day in the not-too-distant future we were to see a more schematicised Chinese dialect appear that would be "international friendly", e.g. more emphasis on the bisyllabic words, less emphasis on tones if any, et cetera. I say this since Chinese tones are in a confusing mess at the moment, not to bag the language but the local chinese languages don't even correlate with putonghua very well tonally. Mind you, what I said might not be the case, since Mandarin has ~800 million native speakers according to China, so the local languages may not matter, and the Chinese govt might not care enough to schematicise the language.

They are however the ones who could manage to get away with it if they really, really wanted. Since the chinese are the "dominant" ethnic group on Earth, it may be a good idea to "internationalise" chinese. On the flip side, it may happen naturally, or the chinese people might reject the idea. Who knows, 'tis all speculation ::lango*.

A little blog discussion about tones in Chinese, and their importance in higher-level vocab (off topic but interesting view on that foreigners with low-level vocab = understandable sans tones, but the higher in vocab level, the more important tones are - sounds like English word length, the more higher-level a word, the longer it generally is).

Regarding english, all the people I know have been studying it during more then ten years, and almost no one can speak it or even understand it...

When I read english here and there, I can understand the words but hardly the leading idea. It seems to me it's the most unclear language in the world...

This I think is more because English is a germanic language and a romance language combined under a celtic shell, so it's like learning bits and pieces of 3 different languages at once, would you agree?

It's a good language though if you want to learn a germanic language, have an interest in celtic culture and speak a romance language, I think. But it requires more effort than learning just one of them (although I personally think German is hard to understand many of the ideas of, since it has the same words, but often they have new meanings , so it might be a germanic thing since the germanic languages are more split up and older than the romance languages)

ceigered:The idea of "putonghua" is that it is the lingua franca and prestige dialect of what we historically call China .. Arabic though, I believe has "split up" already into some other languages. However, standard classical arabic will still exist as long as Islam exists

I don't know Arabic myself (so people who do can correct me), but my understanding is that Modern Standard Arabic is the language of literature and the media across the Arab world, and therefore the language of choice for introductory courses in the West. It sounds a bit like "putonghua" as you have described it, even though there are regional Arabic dialects.

patrik:

Uvi:

Miland:

erinja:Spanish is a huge language worldwide. Many people also speak it as a second language..

It's a big second language in the US, of course, and I imagine also the former Spanish colonies in Africa - Western Sahara, and the North coast of Morocco. Can you name any others?

Yes, the Philippines.

Ah, nope, we don't, we never did.

English may have become the dominant language during the past 100 years (as in California after the American conquest), but the Phillippines were a Spanish possession for 300 years before that. Wasn't Spanish a second language of government and of the educated classes till the end of the 19th century?