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Serious_Fun · Joined: 28 Jun 2005 Posts: 1171 Location: terra incognita

an interesting article in the online International Herald Tribune:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/09/asia/englede.php

tedkarma · Posted: Tue Apr 10, 2007 12:28 am Post subject:

Since almost everyone of school age in India studies English - and add in the English speaking countries - and a few EFL students - and there you go . . .

ilaria · Joined: 26 Jan 2007 Posts: 88 Location: Sicily

Ah, whatever. I give it less than 30 years until voice recognition and machine translation will have developed to the point where we can use our mobile phones as pocket interpreters. No more boring years of language learning drudgery for our students! Yay! And then of course we'll all be out of a job.

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

DNK · Joined: 22 Jan 2007 Posts: 236 Location: the South

I'll defend tedkarma by saying that in my anecdotal experience, most of the school children I came across in the cities knew at least some English. Whether they ever become regular speakers, I suppose, depends on where they are employed in a dozen years or so.

So although, in my experience, 150mil is probably an exaggeration of current speakers, future speakers could be much higher granted the economic situation stays the same and India continues to globalize.

On the other hand, there's just as good a chance that Chinese could start competing. Iirc, they're trying to take away the US' dominance over the internet's hardware, and of course are expanding into the global marketplace so much that it might also be a need-to-know language.

So perhaps there won't be just one global language, but a few. Just some thoughts...

tedkarma · Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2007 12:30 am Post subject:

globalnomad2 · Joined: 23 Jul 2005 Posts: 562

DNK...is it the internet hardware, or software that the Chinese are trying to break into? One problem with the Chinese in that regard is, it's their government doing that, and the Chinese government is obsessed with censorship.

DNK · Joined: 22 Jan 2007 Posts: 236 Location: the South

Hardware. I think it was more than 80-90% of all the internet's infrastructure is located in the States, or at least owned by US companies. Can't remember the exact percent, but it was really high.

Not sure about the software aspect. Not even sure what software you are talking about. Choogle or something?

Just for clarification, for multiple international languages I sort of meant like English, Chinese, maybe Spanish/Portuguese/Hindi. I doubt the latter ones just because India and Latin America's lingual mix will probably keep their importance lower than English and Chinese, even if India ever became an equal economic force to China or Latin America ever tried to "unionize" like Europe.