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Voyeur
Joined: 19 Jun 2003
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 Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 6:50 pm Post subject: Asian Preeminence and the Demand for English |
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I tend to believe that as Asia grasps the lessons of the West, it is inevitable that their numbers will reassert themselves and they will eventually rise to preeminence.
This inevitable trend is being greatly accelerated by America's (and to some degree much of the West as well) debt fueled consumption orgy. 13+ trillion dollars of debt in a deindustralized "service sector" economy that spends 10 times as much on the military as anyone else is unsustainable. American preeminence could conceivably end in our lifetimes.
My question is, for those who see things in a similar way, could the more rapid decline of America affect the global status of english as the lingua franca? If the US is no longer the country that leads the way and everyone aspires to be, could Asians one day wake up and decide: "heh, do I really need to learn English?". |
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mithridates
Joined: 03 Mar 2003
Location: President's office, Korean Space Agency
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| Posted: Wed Dec 31, 2008 9:28 pm Post subject: |
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For the sake of the English language itself, I hope so. I prefer it as this language:
| Quote: |
| Your life ended about five minutes ago under the inept ministrations of Dr. Beverly Crusher. |
and not some mangled version the likes of which you see at international conferences at convention centres throughout the world:
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| [The World best infra, Ubiquitous KINTEX] With the status of the great IT country showing off the world best infra, KINTEX is the ubiquitous exhibition center where the wireless Internet is possible anywhere in KINTEX and all the information on exhibitions, conventions and events occurring in the exhibition center can be found through PDA terminals, exhibition terminals and kiosks. |
That's what happens when the ratio of L2 to L1 speakers becomes too great (I think it's about 90% to 10% right now) and there just aren't enough people to care.
I don't think it will happen through a decline in the American economy, because it seems to be dragging most of the rest of the world along with it at the moment. What will happen though is what the British Council predicts: English will remain the predominant language throughout the world but it won't ever reach the status of a global 2nd language, and at the same time other regional languages will become stronger and stronger. Spanish is one, Turkish is another (in Central Asia).
People often compare languages to big globs of water, where the larger one simply swallows up the smaller ones around it and results in the death of the language, but a more apt comparison is to cities and towns. Really small towns built on a single industry can be wiped out pretty easily by a small shift in the industry it's built around, and the larger the town the better it's able to withstand this. It's not until you reach the rank of a city though that you are able to offer people a more or less complete life without ever leaving the city, because it's only then that you have a variety of places to work, universities that let you learn just about anything you want, and basically anything you could wish to do. The only drain you see between cities once they reach a certain point is at the highest level, with head offices moving from one to another and so on but that doesn't threaten the city itself. That's kind of what languages are like - you can live your whole life only knowing Korean or Japanese or Spanish, though if you're really ambitious you're going to want to learn English to help with that.
I'm hoping for a slight decline in English, a rise in prominence of Spanish/Turkish/Portuguese/etc., just enough to create enough of a deadlock that 1) English can remain the way it is and doesn't have to be mangled by a few billion L2 users, and 2) We proponents of IALs (my favourite is Occidental) can make our case without being told that "English is already the world's second language, so what's the point?" |
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