Is this a winner-takes-all, network effects situation? Are we going to see the entire world speaking English as at least a second language in the next 50-100 years?
English owes its status principally to the political dominance of English-speaking nations—roughly speaking, Britain ruled the world in the 19th century, and America ruled it in the 20th—but it's not a bad choice as languages go. It has a rich technical vocabulary, relatively simple grammar and syntax, and an alphabetic writing system based on the widely supported Roman alphabet. Its only plausible competition is Chinese, due mainly to the massive number of native Chinese speakers, but Chinese writing is so difficult [2] that it's hard to imagine it ever competing successfully with English: although the latter's idiosyncratic spelling is legendary [3], even a mediocre alphabetic system is still much easier than Chinese.
Some people worry that advocating the use of English is an act of cultural imperialism [4], but this issue arises only because for English speakers the native tongue and the lingua franca happen to coincide [5]. It's easy to see the fallacy if you consider the possibility of a different lingua franca; for example, if Swahili were the lingua franca, I would advocate its use, and would strive to master it myself. As luck would have it, I get to be lazy and coast on my native tongue, but if you haven't yet mastered English, it would be much to your benefit to do so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
[2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
[4] http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
[5] In physics, we would call this a degeneracy.
Chinese is presently the most spoken language in the world (native and secondary speakers combined), so if you suspect the winner is going to be a winner in some 'network effects' situation, it might be Chinese. [1] Chinese also has a very strong internet presence. [2]
On a slightly unrelated note, what is interesting is that Hindustani, despite being one of the most spoken languages, has such little influence. Unlike for Chinese or Russian, there is relatively little resistance in it being completely dominated by English as the "business language" in the very areas that the language is native to.
[1]: Some schools in African countries, located near areas where there is Chinese involvement, are teaching Chinese: http://igitur-archive.library.uu.nl/student-theses/2012-0601... -- elsewhere in Americas and Europe there has also been a noticeable bump in people trying to pick up Chinese as their second language.
Counting the total number of speakers is not a very smart way of thinking about "network effects" of languages. You should count the number of speakers among knowledge and media creators. People will have to learn those languages to gain that knowledge and understand that media.
I disagree. Movies, TV, and Music are a powerful way to spread a language because it is a great content is the best way to learn a language, and pop culture attracts young people to the language at an age when it is realistic to learn another language.
Scandinavians tend to be excellent English speakers. One possible reason is that they don't dub TV there. Young people want to know English so they can talk about the cool tv shows and music, and they also get a ton of practice because they watch so much English TV.
Never? The language of science, tech and business has already been displaced several times. It's far easier than you think. At some point it was Greek. Then Latin. Then French. Then English.
The Chinese, for one, could not care less about english content. They have their own "Google", their own forums, music, etc. One can imagine a near future where people from the west learn Chinese to communicate for trade and business and not the opposite. For example, language lessons from non existent and unimaginable in my (European) country, are all the vogue the last 3-4 years. And there is increased demand all over Europe and in the US too for Chinese language courses. From Wikipedia:
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In 2010, 750,000 people (670,000 from overseas) took the Chinese Proficiency Test. For comparison, in 2005, 117,660 non-native speakers took the test, an increase of 26.52% from 2004. From 2000 to 2004, the number of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland taking Advanced Level exams in Chinese increased by 57%. An independent school in the UK made Chinese one of their compulsory subjects for study in 2006. Chinese language study is also rising in the United States. The USC U.S.-China Institute cited a report that 51,582 students were studying the language in US colleges and universities. While far behind the more than 800,000 students who study Spanish, the number is more than three times higher than in 1986.
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How will that play in 15-30 years?
Arguing against my position might work better...
It was a claim like this that motivated me to begin studying Chinese back in the 1970s. But if we are talking about one language community, all of whose members can genuinely converse with one another, today English just might have more speakers than (standard) Chinese has. Social science surveys by the Chinese government suggest that only just more than half of China's population is conversant in standard Chinese,
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
and that squares with the experience of most travelers in China, and most Chinese-speaking people who know a lot of Chinese people outside of China, that there are still quite a few nationals of China who are not readily understood when they attempt to converse with other nationals of China.
Influence of a language depends on a lot more than just raw number of speakers. Sometime way back in the early 1980s, the Xerox company did an estimate of language influence weighted by the per-capita domestic product of persons speaking various languages, which of course boosts the ranking of English (and also of Japanese, at that time) as compared to Chinese.
Looking at what happened to Russian (my apologies to the authors of the first couple comments posted here), I would actually expect the influence of Chinese to decline by 2050, while the influence of English, both from the core strengths of the "inner circle" English-speaking countries (Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand) and the outer circle of countries where English is co-official, and from the unparalleled use of English as a worldwide interlanguage. When someone from Korea meets someone from Japan while both are in Taiwan, either might speak the language of the other, and I have seen that done both ways, but when they want to include a local person in the conversation, unless they really are in Taiwan as students of Chinese, they will likely resort to English to speak to one another. And so it goes with all kinds of unlikely combinations of ethnic groups in all kinds of places all over the world.
I am not at all ethnocentric about my sole native language, General American English, and I am second to none in urging Americans to acquire other languages for additional international understanding, but every mash-up of language groups that happens day by day in today's world is likely to accelerate the spread of English and to increase its influence.
Back in 1970s, interesting! Some questions, if you don't mind:
1) The Chinese language seems to be the odd duck in that it demands significantly more time to get a good grip of it. I've read a number of blogs where the language-learner in the end regrets having spent time learning Chinese[1], (something I seldom see for other languages). My question for you: if you had to decide at this point, in this day and age, would you go ahead and spend the time learning Chinese?
2) What interesting employment opportunity can be expected do you think, after having learned Chinese? I've read over and over again that every big Chinese company has strong ties to the Chinese gov't, and that no foreigner has ever been able to successfully pull it off (a good example is Zuckerburg -- even though the guy himself speaks a bit of Mandarin and has a Chinese girlfriend). Does that pretty much rule out entrepreneurial success in China for foreigners?
[1]: http://thelinguafranca.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/why-you-shou...
In others, such as much of the sciences, it is a de facto standard. Almost all high impact science journals are in English, for instance.
I suspect that what we'll eventually end up with is that most people will speak TWO languages as their native language. It's just so damned easy for kids to pick up two languages if they are exposed to both of them early.
We'll first go through a stage where English is widespread as a second language, learned in elementary school or high school. Arguably, we are getting close to that now in many countries, such as most of Western Europe and Scandinavia.
Many of those people will use English enough at home, either on purpose for their children's benefit or because of the large amount of English content on the internet, for their children to grow up bilingual speaking both English and their parent's native language.