Is Chinese The New Language Of The Internet?
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
India as an example, has majority of its websites targeted towards English speaking audience (which is a huge lot in India) and its not because no body wants to do a regional website, its because the regional websites have very less number of readers. So, learning English is almost a pre-requisite to using Internet here. And there is no hard feeling about having "English" as a pre-requisite because that helps you in reaching to a wider audience.
Niche cannot be denied and we will always have regionally targeted products but that won't replace English at a global level. Even China is training a huge number of people with English.
The only thing that could change this would be near-perfect automated translation. I would not bet on China not getting the most important culture in the world before that :)
I know that English was not always the first language to communicate for everyone but look at 'today" where billions of people are reading and writing English everyday on web at a faster pace than any other language. All the dominant languages earlier did not have this privilege. And the bigger point is that no body minds it. People are more concerned about the their economic status. And this might be very personal but somehow I don't relate to languages emotionally. I am very much an Indian at heart even though I use English for most of my everyday communication needs :)
Regarding the cost for language change, it will take lot of economic turmoil to turn it totally upside down.
For example, Persian occupied the same status that English does today in India, and was replaced pretty quickly once the British took over.
And while I am at it, let me say that this human kindness has not evolved on its own. We are living in a nuclear age, so for one person/country to dominate others it it will take millions of life and an entire economic era to fall down.
So from current standing of the world, thinking that there will be one major global event which will suddenly change the way we live is a little imaginary, unless we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
China is one of the fastest growing economies and there is no denial to the fact the Chinese language will spread once the trade has more open face but at the same time no one else has stopped (US and other English speaking countries). So languages might co-exist but replacing English is far from truth.
I truly wish that more n more languages attain a global status. This will just add to the learning.
It need not even be a collapse - sometimes languages can be adopted for other reasons. For example, upper class Romans spoke Greek (the language of a conquered people), upper class Russians in the 19th century spoke French (if you read War and Peace, it's strange to see so much French dialogue - when the French were the enemy !). Could it be possible that perhaps a century hence, upper class Americans use Chinese among themselves and English to speak to the peasants ?
A more likely scenario is fragmentation into new languages - just as Latin broke up into French, Spanish etc. Often this happens with the influence of local languages. While a collapse in global communications - due to war, resource depletion, or other disaster - would accelerate the process, it can still happen over a longer period of time.
Another new possibility is that advances in technology render the concept of a lingua franca obsolete - a "universal translator". This is unlikely without some major advances in AI but not impossible.
"The Internet" is ultimately still just the accumulation of many people speaking together, and languages will be what they are. There won't be a "lingua fraca" of the Internet because there doesn't need to be one.
But localization doesn't go very well, with the example I'm thinking about being Wikipedia, where the English version is still the place to go when searching for information.
But most of Wikipedia is best in English, sure. That might be just because English is the most widely spoken language in the world. Other languages could match English if they had as many speakers. There isn't any special value inherent to the way Wikipedia works in English or a bias in the code toward English articles.
I suspect many languages have different "internets" though; there's a rather strong language barrier that prevents a lot of their users from experiencing other language's styles.
Although Chinese characters are significantly more complex when compared to the 26 letters in English, thus web designers had to take different considerations for readability.
On the other hand in countries where English-learning is mandatory in school (like most of Europe) people (especially teenagers) are using and reading English websites without problems. English is already the default for the European Union and comes first (on the Internet) before Spanish (second most spoken language in the world, after Chinese), German or French.
One problem with Chinese that I can see is that it's a really hard to learn language. I could learn English and Spanish without even trying, with my native language being one of the Romance languages.
I also don't think the sheer number of Internet users counts so much. Buying power counts for a lot more and while China is on the rise its citizens are not the consumers you want (at least not yet).
Second languages are learned in school, starting from the second grade, and tend to be languages that are spoken internationally.
English and French are the preferred languages, and both are an easy transition from the Latin languages; for that reason alone I have a hard time picturing Chinese taking over.
Spanish isn't the second most spoken language in the world.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_numb...
More telling is that from that same estimation, English is the number of secondary speakers of languages. French was number one, followed closely by English. I'm guessing that by now English has pulled ahead.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_...
[2] The numbers the parent points to are estimates from 1997.