Hmm… Kind of a weird post today.
Anyhow, let’s get started.
Every educated person worldwide knows and can speak and/or write in English, as well as their native language (Except the British, and the Americans, and Australians… you get the idea).
Bearing in mind this only happened because the British enforced language into their Empire, they made sure the natives of whoever they conquered spoke English, well at least a few of them. America rose as a worldwide power, and consequently, anybody who wanted to do any sort of business in America has to learn English. And everybody did. Most people outside of America and Britain, Australia, New Zealand etc are usually at least bilingual, with English being their second language.
Now, it’s all nice for those countries that do speak English, but what if things change over the next few years?
Middle Eastern families are meant to be having children at a higher rate than Europeans are having kids. The Chinese and the Indians already have a population of at least 1 billion, (1.1 – 1.2 billion for India, 1.3 billion in China, and that’s only the mainland as far as I’m aware, though I’m doubting the ROC and PRC will add much difference), and that’s those who only reside in the country. Many have moved, as I am proof of, and it only takes a walk around London to realise its true.
And bear in mind, quite a lot of oil comes from the Middle East. You want to deal with oil: you’ll need to have someone to translate, if you don’t speak it yourself, because every self-respecting businessman knows you can never bargain with anyone in English, except maybe Americans or English people…
China and India are upcoming business powers. Japan is already a business force. Anyone who follows gaming news (console news at least), will know that Japan’s the toughest market to crack, games wise, and if you crack Japan, you’ve got the rest of the world really. So if you really want to get anywhere in any sort of business, you’d need to learn a few more languages, or at least have translators or interpreters.
Arabic, Chinese, Indian and Japanese, if only it was that simple. Arabic and Japanese are languages themselves, as long as you learn the standard, you’re fine in essence, but saying that a Chinese person speaks Chinese or an Indian person speaks Indian is like saying a European speaks European. Makes no sense at all. Also the fact that the countries of the Middle East speak more than just Arabic, for example, Persian (Farsi) is the national language of Iran, so, there’s more.
I know the title says about Chinese, and I’ve not really talked about it yet, but I’m moving onto it now.
I don’t quite know how the Indian languages work, but I do know how the Chinese language system works.
The spoken Chinese language has about 9 main “branches”, and those few then shoot off into hundreds upon hundreds of different dialects. When someone today will say Chinese, they’ll either mean 2 main branches of Chinese: either Mandarin, or Cantonese (usually, it’ll be Mandarin), sometimes it’s slightly different, depending where you are, and can be Min, Wu, Hakka and others.
The main branches are completely unintelligible between each other. Mostly down to the fact the language (grammar, words etc.) is completely different in some aspects. There may be some similarities between the main branches, but it’s mostly words, for example:
In Hakka, the word for half is pronounced ban5
In Mandarin, the word for half is ban4
In Cantonese, the word for half is bun3
The numbers are tone marks. The tone marks are how to pronounce the word, because the difference in pronouncing gives a different in meaning. I’ll probably show you this in another post.
The individual dialects of the main branches, they are understandable between each other, so a Mandarin Speaker from Shanghai can speak to a Mandarin speaker from Beijing.
If you don’t get the dialects bit, think of this: it’s like putting a person from Yorkshire, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle and a Cockney Londoner. Imagine they didn’t know any form of colloquial (or proper) English, and all they knew was the “Apples and Pears” and “Ey up” and “Aye” that they all knew. Except for literally a few words here and there, they wouldn’t understand each other. Same principal with Chinese
Enough explaining of the Chinese language system, you that’s all you really need to know.
Though Mandarin in enforced by the Government, and the next generation are starting to loose their hold on their own dialects. So Mandarin is pretty much the way to go in terms of Chinese.
Back to the topic at hand, will Mandarin ever become the lingua franca? Chances are, probably not. The thing with English is that it’s a mongrel language, it’s easily adaptable and easy to understand, and it’s spelt how it’s spoken. There’s none of this masculine and feminine that you got from Latin, there’s no symbols that you got from the Chinese (And the Japanese and Koreans took the Chinese writing, just look up Kanji for Japanese and Hanja for Korean). And with the ever changing slang, it shows in the language.
Chinese for a fact is that Chinese is still bound by its characters and sounds. That restricts it severely. Take the Coffee Shops Starbucks for example. In China, they can translate the star part of the brand name, but couldn’t quite get the “buck” sound, so they went with the closest thing they could, ba and ke, so in China, they have a brand name in Chinese characters (星巴克), pronounced Xīngbākè, and so it’ll pretty much be Starbake.
And that’s the flexibility of English, you could string 5 letters together and you’d make a brand name of your own!
I guess we’ll see how things turn out then, though I think Japanese does have room to be the Lingua Franca, as they already have certain characters that make words that aren’t in the Chinese characters and can be used for onomatopoeiaa as well.
