Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

Comment by diego_moita | Hacker News Reader

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No, not even close to that. English has 2 strengths very hard to overcome: it is both "cool" and useful. And those strengths are increasing a lot, compared to other languages.

There is an huge amount of pop entertainment convincing kids that English is the "cool" language to learn. Before it used to be just pop music and Hollywood crap. Now is YouTube, memes and software. Also, it is the language of "cool" brands from Nike to Starbucks. No other language comes close to this brainwashing.

And then there is English usefulness. It used to be the lingua-franca for just business, international relations and science. Now it is a lot more than that: it is the language of international social networks and forums such as HN and Reddit. For any kind of culture, technique or know-how someone would want to learn English. It is probably even more useful than math. In most countries, people will earn substantially more money if they know English. Hint: do you know any non-english programming language? Even those created outside of English cultures (e.g.: Python, Ruby, Lua, Coq) are written in English.

Edit: an anecdote that helps understand this. Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages", very similar to each other. It would make sense for people knowing one of these to learn the other, since it would be both easy and useful. However, all over Latin America or the Iberian peninsula, people put more money and effort into learning English than their other sibling language.

> Portuguese and Spanish are "sibling languages"

When I was visiting Portugal I stayed with two people, one from Portugal and the other from Spain. They had been living together for months before I joined them, and speaking to each other in their native languages.

I was a unilingual Anglophone, and to accommodate me, they both spoke English in my presence. It was only through the medium of English that they discovered that they had misunderstood each other for months about various things.

The fact that Spanish and Portuguese were similar lulled them in to a false sense of comprehension, when in fact there are many false friends (cognates) and divergent nuances.

I'm told this happens a lot among Scandinavians too, and Danish is known to be especially difficult for Norwegians and Swedes to comprehend completely, so many fall back on English to avoid misunderstandings.

Norwegian here, can confirm. I can speak to Swedes pretty easily with them in Swedish and I in Norwegian. Danes, despite the fact our languages are written about the same, are really hard to understand in speech. It's much easier to just switch to English.

Going further, I've found that the mainstream Swedish dialect is probably more mutually intelligible with the mainstream Norwegian dialect than some of the more obscure regional Norwegian dialects (and I say this as someone who grew up speaking one of those regional dialects).

I would read an entire blog post/article about this situation.

Indeed, Nordic cooperation, both in business and in civil service, switches to English when the Danes get involved even though some cooperation between Swedish and Finnish entities may be conducted in Swedish. People from Finland, especially ones whose native language is Finnish, have even more trouble understanding Danish pronunciation than Swedes or Norwegians do.

Switching to English doesn't require people from different countries, though. While in Helsinki Finnish-native and Swedish-native speakers typically speak Finnish with each other, there are parts of Finland where Swedish-speakers might not be fluent in Finnish and the most efficient mutual language with Finnish-speakers (who often aren't fluent in Swedish) is English.

Ah, it is the Danish "potato" in their throat :-)

The article itself admits "All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn". What that means practically is that pretty much all non-native-English speaking powers of the globalised world make the learning of English mandatory. If they have a compulsory education system that includes math and science, then I guarantee they also have English as a foreign language in the curriculum.

Several unlikely scenarios I can think of that would cause English to no longer be the top lingua franca of the world:

* aliens arrive and force us all to learn their language * technological breakthrough that allows extreme rapid language learning, everyone learns English of course, but they learn a bunch of other languages at the same time

When I shop for guitars I will look at Japanese sites for Ibanez models not offered in the US. The amount of English on their websites is surprising.

Japanese Example: http://www.ibanez.co.jp/index.html

Chinese Example: http://www.ibanez.com/cn/

My favorite drummer is Japanese, but much of her website is in English

http://kanadesato.wixsite.com/home/profile

Anecdotal: a few years ago, when Brazil was doing very well economically, I visited Chile and pretty much everybody was investing time/money to learn Portuguese, rather than English. I think it's a phenomenon that only lasted for a few years, and was heavily dependent on the current economic situation.

> it is both "cool" and useful

That's a bit short-sighted , the article is talking about centuries. Nevertheless it's probably correct that english will become even more widespread over the next century, in particular i think it will become a lot more mainstream in europe as the second language of necessity.

> That's a bit short-sighted

Yes, it is, I agree. But I just find it futile to forecast what will happen after I am dead.

How come?

I wonder if, as the Internet matures, it will fracture into a Chinese Internet (already exists, to some extent), a Spanish Internet, an English Internet, etc.

This siloing of the internet is already occurring. Being multilingual helps a lot, but even then, one has to jump through quite a few hoops to find the info that you are looking for in anything other than your “main” language.

You see this on GitHub a bit now.

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