sudanglo:The questions you have to ask yourself Geo, is why does the world not take Esperanto seriously, yet is prepared to spend good money to learn English.

Until the Esperantists can answer (satisfactorly) the question as to why the World has largely ignored Esperanto, it will be just be more of the same.

It is clearly no good just rehearsing the same old arguments for Esperanto.

I'm not convinced that because other languages have occupied the role of Lingua Franca, this means that English will one day give way to another language.

It could be different this time. Maybe you reach a tipping point, and, in any case, the world is much smaller now. English is perhaps the first Lingua Franca with truly global reach.

Please wait with this statement that English is global until it really will be global. As far as I know the popularity of English stays at the same level for many recent years whereas other big language (Mandarin) is growing in strength. Once France was also so sure that French will remain lingua franca for all times... and where is it now? It is true that many people are learning this language but only few of them can really use it fluently. I use English for more than 30 yeras and I still do make errors - in fact I can't understand some dialects of English - for instance British-English is hard for me. I don't have many thousands of hours to spend on just one language.

Why do people spend money on learning ? - due to economic power of USA the language has spread all over the world. If US falls, so does the language. And what if a new economic power will arise? Do you think that it will still use English? I don't think so.

geo63:Because nobody takes esperanto seriously. But wait - now it is English, in future it can be other language, since no language is eternal in the role of the lingua franca (latin - French - English - {Chinese}?). The cost of teaching English is enormous. And it is paid by almost the whole world.

This isn't English's fault though this is more lack of efficiency and that an entire English-learning industry has been created which now is at a self-propogating stage. This can potentially happen to any other language including Esperanto, if we are not vigilant.

RE the cycle of languages supplanting each other, I am actually rather curious how it will continue now that the world has been entirely discovered and partitioned between the nations of the earth. Cultural exchange (e.g. EU/Internet/pop-culture exportation) would promote a fusion of languages (imaginably something with English grammatical principles, many postmodern pseudo latin words and "meme" vocab), but the economic world generally supports a language of the largest power, which at this rate seems to support the English and Chinese speaking worlds, but this wasn't necessarily true for Japanese or German.

That conflict might actually benefit English or Esperanto by accidentally continuing the status quo by making people go "well there's no point in changing languages if there's nothing well supported enough to change to". Or perhaps what sustains English will move from western countries to the Internet and global culture, resulting in a sort of accidental Interlingua (looking at this section of Wikipedia shows that English is already far ahead and on target for that).

Is there anyone who is acquainted with the rate at which Latin derived vocabulary is infiltrating the English language?

Anyway, I think EO can help this general chaos by contributing its ideology of regularity to the mix.

English is not very easy but I can't see Chinese taking over anytime soon.

Though Chinese is grammatically not too hard, the writing system is a big problem, as far as international communication. There are many foreigners (= non-native Chinese speakers) who speak Chinese fairly well but can read it only in a very limited way. For international communication, we need to be able to speak it with one another and also use it to read documents that others have written. I think that the difficulty of Chinese writing is a huge impediment to the adoption of Chinese as an international language. In my opinion it's twice the work to learn Chinese; it's practically like learning two languages, both written and spoken. Use of an alphabet, even an alphabet with irregular spellings (like English has) is a huge advantage for an international language.

geo63:Please wait with this statement that English is global until it really will be global.

It is global. Being global doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in the world speaks it, more that it takes place more internationally than it does only nationally - it's used on the international level.

other big language (Mandarin) is growing in strength.

I believe perhaps wrongly that Mandarin is stuck in a similar situation to English, and that it's more that China has a ridiculously high population ("every sixth person on the planet is chinese" sort of thing ). I think Spanish is growing in popularity in its use as a second language, but I don't know if such growth is sustainable since no Spanish speaking country in particular is experiencing an abundance of growth (Mexico seems to be going the opposite way ).

According to some random forum post from 2006, Portuguese is rising in popularity, but 85m speakers by 2050 isn't really high enough, and the community while further spread out than the English countries, isn't very cohesive I don't think. Depending on the outcome of the changes in the middle east, hopefully we'll see Arabic rise in popularity reflecting a positive growth in development in the middle east.

So probably English, Mandarin, Spanish and Arabic, which would be a nice sample size if English and Spanish weren't from the same family. Maybe one of them can forfeit for a turkic/korean/japanese language

Once France was also so sure that French will remain lingua franca for all times... and where is it now?

Embedded for all eternity in journalism, fashion, cooking and English. But more seriously, even if French is no longer spoken, it, along with Latin, have left a very strong imprint on the worlds languages.

If US falls, so does the language. And what if a new economic power will arise? Do you think that it will still use English? I don't think so.

That would be the likeliest outcome had the world not become smaller thanks to international relations and the internet et cetera.

Thanks to those factors, English's fate should the US fall from grace is less known. A US fall may actually trigger unknown consequences - the UK and Australia might suffer for a bit but so would China, and in the resulting mess anything could happen. Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, PNG, (also maybe Malaysia, Indonesia) Canada, and whatever's left of the US would still hold massive influence in the East. The UK and other germanic countries in Europe also have similar power, even if one of NATO's biggest contributors "kicks the bucket". The UK is safe thanks to its position in Europe, but basically relies on China and Europe to stay afloat, Australia's safe for as long as China are around, and happy with us. The current cold war at the moment any way is West vs. MidEast, not West vs. East.

Basically, China needs the US, the world needs China, but should the US fall the rest of the world should be able to make up for it. We Australians are doing just fine with our exchange rate at the moment anyway So the English language is then sort of detached to America.

erinja:English is not very easy but I can't see Chinese taking over anytime soon.

English spelling system is comparable to Chinese on difficulty - in English one also must learn how to write each single word (there are rules, but even more exceptions, same sound can be written differently). How many English can write error free? And how long does it take to master the English spelling?

How do we read? We read not by analizing each single character in a word. We take the word as a whole and we recognize its shape, not its characters - that's why it is harder to read sentences written with capitals, since the shape recognition is more difficult. Chinese do the same. Their symbols are written with 12 types of strokes or so - we may consider them as characters, kind of. These strokes are used in different combinations to form a symbol. Does it not look like writing with our letters? And Chinese can read two to three times faster than you.

Once, when being in China, I was lost in a park. Asking the way in English was useless. But I rememberd that symbol:

口

which was written on exits. I don't know its meaning (mouth maybe), but after drawing it the Chinese directed me to the exit

ceigered:It is global. Being global doesn't necessarily mean that everyone in the world speaks it, more that it takes place more internationally than it does only nationally - it's used on the international level.

Wrong:

Global means of or referring to a globe and may also refer to: around the world

What you refer to is only international. With your definition French, Spanish, Mandarin are all global.

English is well spread but it is not global yet. And that what is spread is hardly English (Globish perhaps). Look at the thread topic - Mr Sudanglo is damn right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jgYmRD8VCg

geo63:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jgYmRD8VCg

!!!

erinja:
I was thinking myself that people don't really care what the conclusion of a report is; they take the language that suits their thesis and ignore the rest.

yes, I suppose people do just pick bits out here and there, use them out of context. But it seems to me that this can back-fire if the reader knows that the conclusions resulting from the quoted sentences might actually be somewhat different to those that author of that quotation might come up with! Stranger still when the author of the report doesn't even mention anything about those differing conclusions - the reader is left wondering what on earth the European Report author might actually think about the notion of 'language ecology' as presented by Mark Fettes! This kind of distracts you from the intended purpose of the final concluding remarks of the report!

geo63:

sudanglo:Fascinating report here

"It is often maintained that acquiring a good command of English is very expensive
and in this perspective the connection between the use of English as a lingua franca
and social justice appears problematic."

One has to learn English for 12 years. The language has very hard pronunciation for most of the world, and do you really know how many deaths have been caused by misunderstanding English? Read about plane disasters.

Sorry, that sounds like a deep personal antipathy against English language which your spiking with arguments from the mentioned report for consolidate this antipathy. Furthermore your statement is full of generalisations. In my opinion no good base for an objective discussion.

geo63:English spelling system is comparable to Chinese on difficulty - in English one also must learn how to write each single word

I'm sorry, but I don't agree with you at all, I think you are completely wrong. You could spell words in a very faulty manner in English and you would still be understood.

If you didn't remember how to write a Chinese character, nothing would help you. You couldn't draw a random assortment of lines and be understood. Most characters are not as simple as 口.

Even with the great irregularity of English spelling, if you read an English word that you don't know, and you pronounce it wrong, an English speaker will usually be able to guess what word you meant to say, even though you got it wrong. If you read a Chinese word you don't know -- good luck! You will be unable to pronounce it at all. You have no chance.

I'm sorry but I have observed this so many times. I was on a visit to Taiwan and I was at a restaurant with a local Esperanto speaker, an American who speaks Chinese, who lives in Taiwan with his Taiwanese wife and kid. I asked him about something on the menu. It wasn't a restaurant with a complicated menu but he was not able to understand all of the items on the Chinese menu. Even though he lives there and reads Chinese menus all the time, he still was not able to recognize all of the words. And I'm sure knows the words in speaking! But he was not able to read them on the menu, or even to make a guess.

That would never happen with English. You could at least sound out the letters and make a guess at the meaning (and you would probably be right).