@@keidanekeith668 Agreed it easy to speak basic understandable English and most people are use to heavily accented English not to mention all the spelling tools to translate. Also Japanese and Korean have shot up in popularity due to the all the content coming out. The top studied languages in order are English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese.
English difficult? Uhmmm depends on each person and/or the context i guess. For me will be any asian language, with so many frking tones for each vowel
@@southcoastinventors6583 Where did you get that order from? In fact there is no way we can rank languages according to the number of people studying or acquiring them as an additional language...we don't have enough reliable figures to do that, plus the figures and stats we do have for individual languages are often not comparable. And while Korean has seemingly become increasingly popular in recent years (and possibly in recent decades), it's unlikely that more people are studying it nowadays than are learning Mandarin, Portuguese or Russian. When it comes to this kind of rankings the only certainty we do have is that English tops them all :) :)
One feature that will make English hard to knock off its perch is just how easy it is for young people to 'accidentally' learn it by things like playing online games in English or watching lots of US TV. A language that dominates popular media will always win out. This is another reason why mandarin will never displace other Asian languages, let alone become a world language. I'd also not underestimate Spanish - its very widely spoken and in my experience a very popular L2 or L3 all over the world.
@@davidguy209 In northern Vietnam the oldest people speak French. The over 60's speak Russian. The younger people speak English, but now increasingly mandarin.
Sadly, according to Wikipedia Spanish only has around 70 million L2 speakers... I wish it had more, but hey, by number of natives it's Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and then English.
Another feature is volumes of scientific literature and programming languages that won't be rewritten soon. Especially the latter are so much engrained in our current technology that makes is hard to get by without basic knowledge of English. Unless those fields get really abstract new 'languages' with symbolic descriptions in place of literal ones, there will not be much change. I'd rather expect the writing to become a little more visual with more use of emoticons and memes as representations instead of abstract written words. That's a change that will be promoted through the new technological possibilities. Basically a new kind of technoglyphs.
One of the biggest advantages for English to remain the lingua franca is that it is so extremely flexible. It's very easy for words to be added to the English language vocabulary, and there's no gatekeeper of what it means
I mean you could say that about any language. The reason why English is the main language is due to European colonization. If india colonized the world, HIndi would be the worlds primary language and we would be adding new vocabulary to Hindi. This idea that only English can be flexible is just brainwashed.
@Dragondude30 I don't think he was saying English was the only language like that, but rather it was one of the ones that is. There are quite a number of languages that are restrictive in terms of both speaking and written
Also, English was the language that started the backbone of the internet and computer science… This helped with the modern English language boom we see today.
I have met many people from Brazil, Haiti, the Philippines, and Spanish-speaking countries who speak English fluently--and they all told me that they gained their fluency mainly from watching English movies and television.
I live near the border country between Spain and Portugal. Virtually every Portuguese person I know, speaks or at least understands English to some extent or other. On the other hand, virtually no Spaniards here speak English. The key difference is all English speaking TV and movies are dubbed into Spanish in Spain, but are in English, subtitled in Portuguese in Portugal. Even those Spaniards that do speak English seem to have very poor pronunciation, mainly because they rarely hear English being spoken. In contrast, the Portuguese seem to pronounce English words exceptionally well.
Anecdote isn't reliable. They watched English movies, television, and music, but they still had to study it. It takes hard work to learn a language. If you watch something in a foreign language, 95% of it will just be like noise.
A little-known fact about the phrase "lingua franca" is that it didn't originally refer to French. It referred to the language of the Frankish Empire (Charlemagne's domain), which is ironically closer to modern German than modern French.
Because the franks were german tribes, and the gaulish were celtic tribes, so at first the frankish language was germanic and the gaulish language celtic, then the roman empire latinised gaulish, and then the franks invaded it. So French is a mix of latinised gaulish and frankish, that's why original frank is more looking like german than french, I am french by the way
I’m not so sure about French. Algeria is one of these francophone countries but each time I visit more and more young people are learning English. Yes, they would know French too but the amount of them learning English grows each time I visit.
I think that it was definitely because of a combination of the British Empire and the way that popular culture from the Anglophone sphere dominated the world--especially in movies and pop music. Leave the "artsy" stuff to other languages. Nobody does "superficial content" like the US and the UK! (Oh, and parenthetically, there is a lot of wonderful Literature--with a capital L--in English, as well.)
There was a period of hundreds years in Japan when the country was all but closed to travel and commerce with other countries, except for a small contingent of Dutch who were allowed a trading post in Nagasaki. In order to deal with the Dutch, a number of Japanese learned Dutch, which they assumed was also the language of all Europeans. When Japan was finally opened to foreigners, many Japanese who had learned Dutch were surprised that Dutch was not the language of most of the foreigners who came to their shores.
Yes. The "蘭学者 " were an interesting group of "scholars," who had the mistaken impression that Dutch was a major language in the West. However, I'm not so sure that they were so ignorant that they thought it was *the* major language of Europe.
@@Mason58654 Back in the 90's, they tried something similar in Hokkaido with a German theme. Using the kitschy and non-German name "Gluck Kingdom." It was a pseudo-German theme park. One of my friends who was from *northern* Germany was offered a job there--but she turned it down, because they wanted her to put on a blond wig and wear some kind of Dirndl that they thought women from Bavaria all wore. :) My impression o f Huis Ten Bosch is somewhat similar.
English is the #1 language in the world because the two Greatest World Powers in Their Era of the last 200 years were both English-speaking. The Brits spread English far and wide, from India to Australia to Burma to Africa to the Americas. And then the United States became the greatest economic power in the world, so their currency and language both became important globally, building even further on what the British Empire had done.
@@acidspit14literally what happened, Britain spreader the language with our empire then after our empire dismantled, or just after ww2, the USA became the great power with English as their main language, with their culture spreading across the western world, so basically since pax Britannia and now Pax Americana the language has become the most popular lingua Franca only way this changes is with technology which with ai could translate
Because of bloodshed and brutal colonial oppression. That is the true answer people might not want to hear. Everywhere the British came ashore, they left destruction in their wake. The same goes for the linguistic genocide they committed from Ireland to Australia and from the US to Nigeria. All those places had beautiful languages before the English came. Linguists call English the ‘killer language’. Scholars predict between 50 and 90% of all languages will have died out before 2100, the main reason being English. Even to this day, the British government spends millions of pounds spreading English through their post-colonial schooling system. The only way we can stop further damage is by first collectively acknowledging there is an unwanted and undeserved lingual hegemony and dismantling that hegemony. I hope that translation technology, allowing us to all speak our mother tongues, will be the savior of languages facing extinction. Just don’t tell the Brits before they kill it too.
Media definitely plays a huge part. Immersion is an important factor when it comes to becoming fluent in a language. If you can't move to the country which speaks your target language, then the internet (movies, tv shows, video games, TH-cam videos) is the only way you can gain immersion. And English speaking nations produce more content available world wide than others. I wonder if Chinese would spread more, were it not for government censorship?
Yea Japanese and Korean are popular languages to learn among young people now i think china could have been similar if they had democracy but with 10x more stuff coming from there.
Well, it is important to remember that when we are talking Mandarin Chinese, we are not only talking Mainland China but also Taiwan & Singapore (both do not have government censorship like Mainland China does), so, I still believe that Mandarin has a chance. That being said, Taiwanese & Singaporian content still needs to be intentionally sought out. I do believe belstar though that Japanese & Korean seems to be taking media by storm at the moment.
My theory (in short): The rise of English as a global lingua franca started with the British Empire, which, at its height, covered around 25 per cent of the world. English holds onto its status because of the cultural and economic dominance of the USA.
It never fails to amaze me how much young people in non-Anglophone countries want to learn English - it's seen as 'cool' and a means of getting ahead in life. It's this natural and uncoerced zeal to learn English (particularly among young professional types) that will perpetuate it as a global lingua franca. The sad flipside is, many look down on their own language because it represents 'no' economic or professional value. I can't help but feel lucky that I'm a native English speaker, but also wish I felt the same onus and pressure to study other languages to even the playing field. Greetings from Australia!
@@Hadrianus01 I mean it's not really too shocking that other young people see English as cool. Most clothing you buy has English on it, most movies and music are in English, most of the more successful nations are Anglosphere/English speaking nations. I could say a lot more, but it's late and I'm tired lol.
I think English as a lingua franca is also a result of the importance of scientific work in the US after world war 2. English is my 3rd language but i am glad that it was thought to us in school in a certain level, otherwise i would be like dependent on translations f.e. of medical scientific papers to German. But I must admit that I am not very comfortable with talking so I would prefer if Spanish would surpass English in the US 😅 maybe then things may change
@@Hadrianus01 English has Latin alphabet, which is easier than most other writing system. Easy to use writing system is a huge advantage. Which make Arabic, Chinese, etc as not a good candidate for Lingua Franca. So, English only has to worry about other Latin Alphabet using languages.
My wife is a native Spanish speaker, but was taught exclusively in Italian in elementary school. She was also taught English in high school. We are now living in Spain and Catalan is slowly working its way into her brain. She's told me in the past that English was the easiest to learn. It is so engrained in her that she thinks in English.
Aside from spelling, she's right. English mostly nouns are gender neutral, thus only one 'the' (unlike el, la, los, las, in Spanish or der, die, das in German). English adjectives stay the same regardless of the noun ... one green house, two green houses. Conjugation of verbs is much simpler. The only case suffix is the possessive 'apostrophe s'. The biggest problem I'v run into in helping others le(a)rn English is spelling. Clean that up a bit, and English wd grow even stronger.
A common misconception about Mandarin speakers is the number of native speakers vs non-native; Actually China, Singapore and Taiwan have many people who speak Mandarin but their real native language is a dialect of Chinese which can be VERY different from Mandarin or even something else like Taiwanese Aboriginal languages etc.
@@thedamntrain I agree. In an extreme case Taiwan Hokkien is often called a Chinese dialect but it borrows so much from Japanese etc that it is only 70 percent the same as Hokkien in Fujian. Far less than say Dutch and German...
@@Perririri No. Actually the meaning/way of saying a word can be different between dialects but can be written in simplified or complex. A good example of this is that in GuangDong they will usually use simplified but complex/traditional characters in HK and Macau where they also speak the same language (Cantonese). That said we have words that are specific to dialects and can not be written. Cantonese has some characters that are in common use but are specific to it and not really understood by Mandarin only speakers. In Hokkien as used in Taiwan it is really just a spoken language and thanks to the sound based borrowing from Japanese it is basically impossible to write a lot of words. Where it gets really strange is we have a lot of words that went from English to Japanese to Taiwan Hokkien and are sort of able to be understood in context if you can speak English (I am a citizen of Taiwan but I am part of the 30 percent plus that is not a background Hokkien speaker but my English is fine).
For the younger generations, that is less and less so. The numbers of living native speakers of non-Mandarin Chinese languages are still big, but the average age of those native speakers is high. Mandarin is more and more the mother tongue of Chinese people in the PRC, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.
I’m Australian born Chinese but I think English is underestimated in its beauty. Another factor to its success would actually be its simplicity, and it allows people to focus less on the language, but more in science and creativity.
My favourite story of the dominance of English is about am airline pilot in Germany and the air traffic control people insisted on speaking English despite, of course, being native German speakers. The German pilot asked why he, a German flying in German air space, should be speaking English. To which a British pilot responded with “because you lost the war!”
English is actually required universally for all pilots and ATCs so that there is quick and effective communication in the event of an emergency and normal interactions. That way, you touch down on your wheels instead of a flaming hole in the ground. Imagine a German air controller talking in German to a Delta plane coming in from JFK to an American pilot. If they can't communicate, things get bad fast. But yeah, losing the war twice doesn't give you a lot of say in things. ;)
@@panachevitz I'm surprised the German didn't respond with, "Ja, but vee vonn ze vurld cup four times." Sitting near the front of the cabin of a Dash 7 aircraft at a remote airport in northern Scandinavia once I was able to hear much of what the pilots said and, to my surprise, all the communication between the pilots and the tower was in English.
English is a mixed blessing because it has given me the opportunity to communicate and form relationships with people from other cultures that would not have been possible otherwise. Also, because of the Internet. The downside is I feel like English at times plays a dominant role in communicating. For example, I seen people in the language community in particularly Western European countries say, instead of speaking their mother tongue, it’s a mix of their native language and English words as a replacement.
For me, I do hate the fact English is my native tongue due to political conflict I hear and see in it disgusts me. The "cancel culture, woke culture, social justice ".... All of that is in English, the only exception was saw a very similar thing in polite speech Japanese, but was more of a cry for censorship. Of " think of the children ". English for me, despite being a native, I loan a lot of Latin language words. Keep an older syntax. I have saw a rise of " me " being in front rather than I. Which bugs the shit out of me as it comes off rude. There is a loosening of " I VS. ME " in the USA. I would say my English is internationally influenced, but mainly online. I find English is more of a language of conflict. The pronoun system getting mixed with honorifics within some circles. Where it's demanded with X statement of " him/her, she/her ". I don't see the point of a breaking a perfectly fine grammartical gender system. I find that's the beauty of other Germanic and Latin languages. You can condense and convey more specific information via those methods with markers for what the word is and meaning. Asian languages don't, but convey more meaning when written, but is pitch heavy but can convey more specific information via context.
@@MaoRatto Well, I try and look at it like it would not matter because if I lived in a European country especially, a Western European country I would have to learn English anyway non the less. I just wish maybe when I was growing up there would have been more opportunity to learn them in my country instead of just English and French. I speak more than one but probably after English, I am most comfortable with speaking Russian (speaking) not writing, Spanish, and French. Furthermore, Russian is a hard language but I like it because it is unique to any other language. Also, part of my background is Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish so, all the more reason to learn.
@@MDobri-sy1ce M'i, disappointed with mainly the people whom speak it. I hate the social conflict associated with it. Rather than the language of it. English as a language is a fine tongue, but culturally destorys everyone else like a virus. It's a real shame. If didn't have " political correctness, wokeness, and social justice " activism that it associates with. I would be fine it. I do love how Slavic languages have their own unique scripts to write in. As it feels like a proper alphabet, but... I prefer a syllable based system where 1 letter + vowel combinations / pitches.
@@forgottens7712 I can tell you, further south you go on the east coast. You will hear more spanish loan words, or the pronouncation is more akin to Mexican Spanish. When my co-workers say shut up, ( my co-workers do understand me responding in shut up please )... Typicaly loan " Catt'e por vor! " (My Linux PC's keyboard hasn't been optimized to use special letters ;( . ) Though English in the eastern south region gets softer. Though got a bad habit of mixing I's and Me's where they do not belong. Me is a plural and goes after ( your friend/family/co-workers ). I swear English is getting more basic or simplified. A lot of my vocab is closer to a romance language than the standard which is probably due to the fact of heavy exposure to Latin / Romance language words from music, education, and come in close proximity with Spanish speaking artists online.... Trying to figure out why the Spanish / Brazilian speaking world has such kick ass artwork, same with East Asia.
Your video is quite thought-provoking, thank you for taking the time making it. I'm French and I teach English in middle and high school, I was actually looking for a video for my class to explain why so many people speak English around the world but unfortunatly, this is way too fast for them. However, I've been quite surprised with what you said at the end : French becoming the number 1 language and English being not so easy to learn. Very unexpected as I believe English grammar is super easy and English vocabulary is all around us (through media). Sure, it can be hard to pronounce but that's it - I will watch your other video to see if you can convince me. I truly believe that French is way harder to learn, so many things make no sense at all. If you ever make the same video but shorter and slower, I will definitely show it to my pupils. Keep up the good work. :)
I am learning Spanish. Before I found this video, I noticed that all the Spanish learning videos I watched, the persons can speak perfect English while we English speakers are struggling to learn one. So I do agree with this video.
What sucks is because English is so popular, I can never practice my French and Spanish when I travel. When people hear me try to speak another language, they automatically speak English, and others would want to practice English with me. Ah well, I still enjoyed my vacations! Edit: Yes, once in a while, people will speak to me in their native language. In fact, in Canada, I had a secretary teach me French!
Yes, and that’s why I think travelling abroad to learn a language is overrated. Better to study from home until you’re good enough to hold your own when you travel. There is such a thing as the curse of the English speaker!
The locals probably have a hard time understanding some tourists because of the tourists' accents and/or lack of command of the language. But it's fine to say hello and such.
One other consideration is that when English was imposed on various conquered countries, in some places people ended up favoring it because there were so many different native languages. This is particularly true in India and the Philippines, where the various native tongues are mutually incomprehensible.
Making mother tongues home exclusive and removed from any public spaces completely. Same happened in Nigeria and South-Africa, where pretty much no one speaks English as its first language. It is beyond sad.
IMO, highly tonal languages like Mandarin are unlikely to become lingua francas because people raised in syllabic systems will just have too much trouble learning proper enunciation.
I'm starting to study Chinese now and I have to say, the tones aren't that bad and once you get them, you get them. The thing I realize that will ensure Chinese doesn't dominate is a combination of the writing system and, just as bad, the lack of loan-words. There are very few loanwords in Mandarin and it just doesn't evolve. American standard English is the opposite: picking words from another language and adding them into the mix is no problema. Even Mandarin words and terms feng shui, yin and yang, tao, chop chop and wumao.
What makes you think English is not tonal? As an Englishman tone of voice can change meaning of a sentence. But hey tonal languages are always hard right?😊
Trying to speak a language is hard enough but, have you ever tried to understand the written Chinese? Even Chinese children take 7 years to learn at least 10,000 characters by study in order to read a Chinese newspaper! And I was told that by a Chinese teacher.
Tunisian here and I'm seeing more and more of the youth gravitating towards English (but French is still a big part of their lives through school etc.)
This video absolutely floated my boat: history, language, geopolitics, futures, animation, and confirmation that all the duolingo time I'm putting into learning le français is not going to waste. Subbed!
Yeah the sun will set on the English language one day but just because French is big in north Africa doesn't mean much when English is in much of Africa itself in Addition to all parts of the world.
@@marc-andrechevrette3420 But the simplest, most commonly used words are Anglo Saxon(99 of the top 100, for example) . Also the articles, prepositions, pronouns.... Having a layer of French /Latin nouns, in addition to the Old English and Old Norse Germanic, leads to a huge available vocabulary.
@@guppy719 French is in Central Africa and North Africa that's what make it the lingua Franca of Africa in the future, and since China have big interest in Africa the entire Chinese population will learn French instead of English
Another big barrier to Mandarin or Hindi becoming a lingua franca is that those languages' base is only in one or two nations. English became established through colonialism in dozens of regions across the world (Australia, India, Africa, east Asia, the Caribbean, etc), which allowed a more regional spread. For instance, for people from, say, Indonesia, English wasn't just a language spoken popularly europe or north America, but in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia (and NZ, haven't forgotten you). This meant that regional power centers would operate in English, spreading it outwards from that source as well as the original source, the UK.
@@sakurakou2009 Although I would say Mandarin is the second most useful language across Asia on average, it is pretty much useless outside of Asia other than in a few Western countries with large Asian populations (Canada, NZ, Australia...). Russian has a much larger geographic sphere of influence (eg for most of Eastern Europe, Mongolia and quite of Stan's countries like Khazakstan) and Spanish or Portugese have at least one country on a few continents which use these languages so although I speak Mandarin, English and some local dialects I still expect to use English as my default language outside of a few Asian countries for as long as I live...
@@naguoning Mandarin is mostly useless in asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Phillipines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and other asian countries. Population wise it might seems like alot in Asia are speaking Mandarin but they are all in China, so it is only useful in China and the country of Taiwan. You can use it in Singapore but most here prefer to speak English, English being the 1st language being taught here in schools, Tamil, Malay and chinese are taught as 2nd language. Most Singaporean pass the GCSE O'level english. Among all the Asian languages Malay is easiest to learn since it uses English alphabet. It is spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia (similar to malay) ) Trying to learn Mandarin you will encounter many teachers especially those from china trying to push the CCP/CPC influence and agendas.
@@nsevv My Mandarin is very much Taiwan style. I hate the CCP!!! I personally found Mandarin useful enough in some parts of Malaysia and Indonesia because so many businesses there are run by ethnically Chinese people. Although I am a Taiwan citizen I am part of the five percent or so that is not of ethnically Chinese origin so people outside of Taiwan tend to not use Mandarin with me unless they hear me speak it. I was surprised to find it was actually very useful in Cambodia. Again because so many businesses were run by Chinese people. In Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand English is certainly more useful. The difference with Chinese in Cambodia was I could have quite in depth conversations where as the English used was virtually always quite basic. I don't for a second doubt that English is the most useful language in Asia overall but I think Mandarin is next in usefullness within Asia.
7:00 Having a single unified language is one of the best things that can happen to the world. Communicating helps bring us together. The loss of diversity is sad on the one hand, but uniting people is a worthwhile cause
Yeah Language is one of the bigger naturally unifying forces. Look how close the USA and UK are after getting off on the wrong foot. The language naturally brought them back together. It comes down to how much value each language intrinsically has and there is no right answer. Hell you could argue that its similar when losing dialects yet most people don't lament their death.
Not worth it. Our diversity and character as humans is based on culture and language. A single language would wipe out so much of that, the world would be a far poorer place for it. Having said that people being multilingual would make for a better world.
A common language we can all speak is not as big a threat to other languages as you might think. The Netherlands has more English proficiency than Canada ... but walk down a Dutch street in a residential neighborhood and you will struggle to hear any English at all.
You hit the nail on the head when you talked about money. The USA, UK, Aus, Canada NZ, Ireland, Singapore are all rich countries. However by that logic it’s going to take a very long time for French to take over. Outside of France and Quebec,most francophone counties are poor, providing less incentive to learn the language and I don’t see the economic output of the Congo overtaking the US any time soon. Geography also plays a massive role. English is spoken widely across many continents. Spanish is primarily useful only in Latin America, it’s not going to help much in Asia or Africa…and Chinese is kinda useless outside China and it’s immediate vicinity.
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se You... You do realize that no matter where you live any language that is not your own, is a forgein language. Any language that you do not speak regularly can be called foreign. THIS INCLUDES SPANISH
The Latin speaking parts of Europe never stopped speaking Latin. The Latin just naturally evolved as all languages do, and different varieties got different names like Spanish, French, Romanian, etc.
Latino aka conquistadore aka Catholics, the old enemy of the British empire. English is a language of culture and freedoms and Latin a language of enslavement and misery. That's why English defeated all other languages. Because it is a superior language and upholds the principles of humanity and greatness.
@@notinterested8452 tf you on about you don't know what language that person speaks . I disagree with you and my native language is English and I am British and my parents are British and so are their parents and so are their parents. All languages are just languages if you can convey a point to somebody else it really doesn't matter. Why not just let people speak what language they want and stop acting like any one language is superior if it isn't . A superior language would be something that has very distinct pronunciation for each word, words are short , and it actually makes sense grammatically .
Although I would like this to be true since I'm a native french speaker, I have doubt about french becoming a lingua franca for the world unless the Académie Française in France makes major change to the language. For non native french is hard to learn and for everyone, even native french speaker, it is hard to write it correctly. On the other hand, english is very easy to learn and you can become proficient within 2 to 3 month. I think that in the futur (like 200 or 300 years) the language of the American continent will transform into some kind of spanish/english, a spanglish if you will. The language will be composed of English terms, laced with Spanish and Portuguese and probably hardly understandable for today's people. That or we'll communicate telepathically with images, thoughts and feelings. Who knows! Cheers to all and Merry Christmas!
If reforming French was an issue that mattered enough to people, they could get it done without wasting a single second on the Académie. The Académie has no legal authority to set any standards for the language. None at all. Just a bunch of silly old sods cosplaying 17th-century nobles and yelling "get off my lawn" to an empty front porch.
I think the map you used shows why French won't become a lingua franca. Even though its the official languages for a lot of those countries on that map, less than a third of most of their respective populations are francophone
Having traveled quite a bit of the world, I don't see English being knocked off its perch. The language is infectious and very easy to learn despite some of the difficulties(spelling) French has its issues as a language which act as a barrier to learning. I see it in Canada, Quebec is starting to lose it's french and they are hard-core protectors of their language.
Yeah, English is very easy to learn to an intermediate level, but surprisingly hard to be perfect at. So many exceptions to rules, and different root languages making pronunciations irregular. But even if you do get those wrong, it's usually still easy enough to understand your meaning.
I think that the extreme flexibility of the English language in terms of its ability to form patois and creoles in localities where non-native speakers live gives it a greater edge over French, or other European languages with their versions of the Académie Française.
Patois should be seen as a different language in its own respect. Native English speakers without the relevant ancestry have much trouble understanding it.
That ability is intrinsic to all languages of the world. Even a hardly rigid language such as latin evolved in new variations, namely the romance languages
I've always thought it was the combination of the British Empire's former reach and the United States influence as the most influential superpower especially when it comes to media and culture such as books, shows, movies, music, etc. that makes English a very dominant language.
I've worked in several companies who employed people from all over the world. It was quite amazing to speak with people from Russia, Indonesia, Ireland, France, and other countries, and learn about their customs. We all understood each other well because everyone was speaking English.
The next lingua franca will not be French, Mandarin or Spanish. It will be a descendent of English. Not English as we understand it today, but a mutated form that adheres to ease of pronunciation across multiple cultures.
Like how latin seperated into multiple languages I think ur right but back then people didn't have the internet so maybe it won't spread to many languages if the world is connected
I hope the spelling changes too, because S and C shouldn't sound like each other. And the letter Z "needz to be uzed" more often. And there's some other things i would want English to change for the better lol
I agree, I think it would evolve more as one since it's hard nowadays to isolate cultures due to globalization and the internet. I noticed that British and American english at one point were slowly separating, but due to globalization it started merging again. Also within British provinces and American states, local accents are starting to die out, which if industrialization never happened would have transformed into their own languages. It's happening in my country too, where we adopt slang from halfway across the world because of the internet. The next lingua franca would be a new language in which the languages of the most dominant entertainment-exporting countries reign.
I think it will be difficult for another language to supplant English because of the Network Effect. You can read about the Network Effect on Wikipedia. Speaking of Wikipedia and the network effect, there are more in-depth articles on the English Wikipedia than on any other language's Wikipedia. That's an example of the network effect: There is greater utility in learning English because there is more English content on Wikipedia; and for each person who chooses to learn English for this reason, there is a chance such a person might one day choose to contribute to the English Wikipedia, thereby causing the amount of English content to expand even further, and further increasing the utility of English. A spiral. A snowball. I speak of Wikipedia as an example, but the same can be said for other things: movies, media, scientific papers, ...
Networks are like chains though and all chains are broken sooner or later...plus we should not forget that Wikipedia and lots of other knowledge and "intellectual creations" currently available in English cannot be accessed in the People's Republic of China...
I think in the distant future English will be similar to how Latin was in the year 1500 where nobody speaks it as a first language anymore but it will still be dominant in science and other high end things also about Wikipedia the English Wikipedia has been really disappointing me recently a lot of other language articles turn out to be more in depth and have info that is not in English but most people don't know enough languages to find the best one since its quite random which is the best.
@@belstar1128 We will see. English became the main language of science fairly recently (namely in the interwar period and, most notably, after WWII) and, to the best of my knowledge, only established its dominance in this field once for all in the 1980s with the spread of personal computers and the demise of the Soviet Union. You see, it all happened fairly quickly. I cannot see any reason why another language (or other languages for that matter) could not take over this role from English equally quickly. Indeed, in the late 1880s most scientific journals were in German, with English a close second, and even as late as 1920 German was still the most prominent language of science worldwide despite Germany having lost the war...
@@belstar1128 meaning, no global language or global lingua franca exist. English is always be a REGIONAL LINGUA FRANCA just like the rest of the lingua francas Worldwide.
Most wikipedia articles are just auto translated to other languages these days, that's a pretty bad example I feel like the biggest factor in spreading the popularity of the language has to do with Disney/Marvel and American video games, but they're slowly becoming terrible due to wokeness and blatant ideological propaganda so it won't last
Whilst some elements of English are hard (strong verb past tenses, spelling), in fact it is one of the easiest languages to make oneself understood in either written or verbal: - 1. Latin script, minimal diacritical marks. 2. Little inflexion of nouns or verbs. 3. No declensions or conjugations. 4. No grammatical gender. 5. No agreement of adjectives or articles. 6. Virtually no artificial tenses - e.g. subjunctive little understood or used by native speakers. A non-native speaker may struggle to understand a native (e.g. "I will not" can be "I'll not", "I won't" or even "I ain't"), virtually any phraseology the non-native uses will be understood by a native speaker. This is just compared to Indo-European languages, other languages with their ideographic scripts, tonal speech etc. are much more difficult - e.g. Japanese, which requires far greater study for natives than English. Perhaps this is the reason so many choose English as their second language - it is the easiest to learn...
And this makes it highly suitable to writing of contracts and technical specifications which is why even Chinese companies prefer to use English outside of their own country. The Finnic languages would also probably fit this mold but we never conquered anything.
In his book, BABEL NO MORE, Michael Erard states that 70% of the English speakers worldwide, English is not their first language. Making English the only language with more non-native speakers than native ones.
@@soundscape26 total number of french speakers Worldwide (including the least proficiency in French) is just half of the total number of native Spanish-speakers.
@@adrianwakeisland4710 I know yes, I was referring to that book's claim that English is the only language with more non-native speakers than native ones.
False. Swahili has a handful of natives yet the majority have never even met a Swahili person. L1 speakers could be in the tens of millions yet L2 and L3 has hundreds of millions.
If I try to practice my Spanish with a native Spanish speaker, there is a near 100% chance that their English is better than my Spanish, so then I just feel rude for communicating in a clearly less efficient way. The ubiquity of English makes it so much harder to learn anything else!
I've never had much trouble communicating with native Dutch speakers in their first language despite the fact that their English was usually better than my Dutch though...and it has been all worth it by the way!
What spanish speaking countries have you been to? Having in lived years in latin America that is absolutely not true. To live in latin America you HAVE to know Spanish. I met almost nobody who could speak English outside of obvious tourist traps.
@@matthewosborn1123 perhaps I'm wrong, but in my experience quite a lot of non-tourist spots in puerto rico have tons of english speakers! It could just be the USA's influence being especially strong over there, there's a lot of anglicismos...
My Hungarian friend said that he did not fault Americans for speaking only 1 language. The countru is big and so much happens here. In Europe, multiple languages are useful, within a short distance people speak other languages, so motivation and opportunity exist. For Americans, Quebec or Mexico is the closest opportunity. As you said, so many speak English everywhere, so its just human nature.
Looking at long term lingual dominance, like 500+ years from now or something, we'll probably see a seemingly alien version of English. As many people learning it as a second language, often including words and/or sounds from their first language. With the connectivity of the internet, and popularity of other widely spoken languages, we might get a cool English-like smoothie
English accents have changed incredibly since the 1950s. They are still localised, but many dialect words have fallen into disuse. The Cockney accents of the East End of London, and the dialect rhyming slang that went with them, sound very different to the Cockney English of my grandmother. We are in for another Great Vowel Shift, sses are much more sibilant, inflection has changed at the ends of sentences. And the pitch of American English is much higher than it was even twenty years ago. Future English may be globally intelligible in 400 years, but you and I would find it difficult to follow.
I could imagine a blended, creole version of English with like Spanish, Italian, etc. mixed in there, the next evolution of the language is coming on the horizon, maybe in 100 years or so we will start to see it happening
When I was young girl, I thought that lingua franca should be the language of the biggest country, so I thought it should be Russian. I was so confused and a little dissapointed because I thought it would be much easier to learn Russian (as a Serbian speaker), but I had to learn English
@@hansgruber788 Yes, I'm very satisfied with my knowledge of English. It's very useful to know any foreign language, especially English. When I started learning (I was 7) it was difficult to read and write and to pronounce some words and I didn't like it that much, but now when I know English enough to be able to comunicate with other people it's incredible feeling. I also know French, but I don't speak Russian 😂
English is also used by other countries that don't speak each others language. For instance airline pilots, ship captains, etc...I recently was watching a show about airport police in Spain. When they would come across someone who didn't speak Spanish, the first thing they would ask is "do you speak English?" And more times than not, they did.
English has imperialism as the main reason, but this leads to some key things that separate it from the other imperial languages 1. Media influence [English dominates the internet, 'nuff said] 2. Vast geographical spread [not confined to Africa only or the Americas only or The North only, English has a presence in lots of places.] 3. Slowly spoken pace [It's not spoken very fast, so it's not hard to find the spaces between words and actually get the rhythm. This is offset by contractions, but not by much. Too many languages [but not Mandarin] speak at 600 kph. English is not one of them [except maybe the New York or Irish dialects]. 4. Native Speaker Attitude [The meanies likely don't have a fallback language, and the nice ones are super polite and willing to help, and both are likely very literate and won't shut up. No introversion, no condescending cutting off to another language, and lots of concepts to explore for the curious...but this plays into media again] 5. Easy-to-learn-hard-to-master grammar and syntax [no cases, no conjugations, no genders, no weird verb-goes-here-with-this-conjunction [Hallo Deutsch] or this-adjective-goes-before-noun-but-this-one-after [Hola Espanol]...but there are enough exceptions left over to make you question.] 6. Borrowed words galore [This is why spelling and pronunciation are hard, but it also means you can probably find a cognate in there somewhere and pronounce it mostly like your own language...you'll have to battle other people's cognates, but that's a good bond too.]
Pity he speaks so fast...it's not a problem for me but for non-native speakers it must be close to being unintelligible. Just because the language centres of the brain work at 2x speed doesn't mean your mouth has to!! Select a lower gear next time....
Most overlooked is the World Wide Web being made by an Englishman. To program/code, you still need English. Considering the success of the web, it set a future precedent.
What do you mean NY and Irish dialects are spoken particularly quickly? Is there any evidence for this on average because that strikes me as bullshit, could be wrong though
Sometimes I think about the english words that are used in programming and I wonder if in the future, in case programming doesn't change its core drastically, programmers will see those word as relic of the past that are no longer used outside their field or who knows what else
English has a lot of inertia in science and tech at this point; ironically just like a programming language doing a refactor/translation in another when you've already written so much in the original would be super difficult 😀.
Its going to be like latin was a few centuries ago not really a spoken language but it has a lot of impact and will be found in text form for millennia.
@Rafael Santana Englsih hasnt changed much since shakespeare so there is not much chance it will change drastically in the next 500 years. If people can still understand shakespeare now they will probably still be able to in the next 500 years.
One big reason is that English is a forgiving language, in that you can get by with speaking it badly. There's so many varied English accents and dialects and native English speakers are used to foreign people speaking bad English so you don't need to be precise. I've learnt a few languages and none of them come close to English with how native speakers don't care so much about imprecise pronunciation, jumbled grammar and generally being patient when conversing with someone who speaks English badly. The goal is to communicate and be understood, that's mostly it. With other languages they look at you as if you're from another planet if you mispronounce one word slightly.
English is the 3rd language we start learning in school in my country. I’m quite please with knowing English. It’s an interesting language imo. I prefer it over French. It’s much more difficult for me to pronounce than English, and is even more difficult to spell. Probably because all of the languages I’ve studied are Germanic languages, except for Spanish, and that was difficult for me to learn. Studied it for 1 year, and can’t even hold a very basic conversation in it anymore, after a few years.
@@Blaze6432 I’m from the Faroe Islands. We are a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, so we are required by law to learn Danish as well as our native Faroese language. English is then added on at the 4th grade (was 5th grade when I went to school) because of its usefulness in international relations. 🙂
@@Lemonz1989 English is also quite closely related to Danish, though the Frisian Dutch dialect is the closest. I didn't know that the Faroes had their own language. I'd always assumed it was Danish. You learn something every day. 👍
One thing you didn't mention is how easily English adapts to new circumstances. Since it's a mixed language, it can incorporate words from other languages very quickly. I studied Spanish and German and while the latter has a similar adaptability, both languages are not built to keep up quickly. German is especially hard to get it right with four cases. If you think English has no rules, wait 'til you get a load of French. Symbol-based languages like Mandarin are never going to survive in much the same way that Roman numerals did not survive contact with Arabic numerals. Learning 20-30 letters and constructing words from them is far easier than learning thousands of symbols not to mention how a symbolic language would work in, say, computer code. In history, there were a lot of non-European empires that came and went. It was just coincidence that when it was Europe's turn to colonize, advanced weapons were also created to keep them in power. By the same token, lots of languages have prevailed over the centuries but English took its place at the same time as global communication exploded. Don't look for English to be replaced any time soon.
@@supercolinblow While I never took French, I do remember reading that in like the 1500s, they redesigned the language to make it sound more beautiful. That had to introduce a lot of weirdness in spellings and lots of exceptions, no?
I think media and the internet mean English will stay on top. It's the reason my daughter's Argentinien husband speaks English and she struggles with Spanish.
Next lingua franca: Spanish??? I think a lot more could be said on this. Maybe a video ranking top 5 contenders for next lingua franca, with pros & cons of each.
Francophone Africa certainly has an advantage in birthrates but as another commenter stated, young Africans will continue to seek opportunities and adapt to English speaking environments unless something drastic is done in their home countries. Just like "Friends" has been the quintessential show for English learners since it aired in the '90s, Spanish language music and pop culture is growing rapidly in popularity. The range of similar vocabulary between Spanish and English and the common popular and social culture between North America and Latin America will certainly help this development as well.
Spanish can't be lingua franca because of its limited geographical area. Spanish speakers are mostly in Latin America whereas English and French speakers are on every continent.
@@Syl75 Spanish is confined in the americas, but entering more and more in the U.S. that could led to some interesting language development. Dunno, maybe becoming in some distant future the ruling language in that country, or creating a new language type of Spanglish?
fun fact: the EU originally had French as its lingua franca, but one of the unintended consequences of the UK joining in the 70s ensured that French was displaced by English. Romanians in Brussels will tell you that they speak English with a Bostonian accent because they learned English by watching 'Friends'.
It's a bit more complicated. The EU officially refuses to have a single lingua franca in order not to privilege any member country. That's why it has 28 official languages. The official language of each member is also an official language of the EU. As this is obviously impractical, there are also 4 "working languages". Both French and English are among them. Another one is German, which was never actually widely used despite its official status.
Nice thing about speaking a “smaller” language, like Dutch for instance is that when you’re abroad, nobody has a clue about what you’re talking about with your spouse or family unless you want them to and switch to English.
In the Falklands conflict the Welsh regiments spoke in Welsh on the radio to make life difficult for the Argentinians should they intercept the transmissions.
Tegenwoordig moet je daar wel mee uitkijken hoor, als je eens een keertje op vakantie bent in Azië en denkt een Aziaat tegen te komen moet je niet over me gaan roddellen want ik versta het gewoon XP
I like that you deviated from your usual topics this time around. I think it would bring a lot of added value to your channel if you keep bringing this kind of videos. :)
as a non native speaking european, it's damn nice to be able to speak with people from other european countries with relative ease, in a language that I'd say isn't ugly, and easy to learn. and wouldn't want to see it change to something else.
It's not really surprising when you look at the history though, The British had by far the largest empire in human history which gave them tremendous influence over regions located on the other side of the world. Remember the sun never set on the British empire, thats how massive and powerful britain was at its peak. On the other hand The US, a nation indirectly created by the British. The US was the sleeping giant of WW2 and after the war was over the US alongwith USSR became the superpowers in the world and the European era was over. The USSR also had a lot of influence on its neighbours but the US gained influence all over the world through programs like marshall plan and investing in Japan. This helped the US to gain stable and reliable alliance. American culture through its games and Hollywood and tech industry reached all parts of the world including the USSR, American movies and tv shows and games like San Andreas(parody of American culture) was enjoyed by people all over the world. So the US and UK were probably the most powerful and influential countries in the world for the past 2 centuries and guess what globalisation was also at an all time high and still is and guess what language these countries spoke: ENGLISH!!!
The Sun still has yet to set on the British Empire. It is admittedly a close thing but there is still enough territories that some part is always in sunlight.
7:15 I disagree with that sentiment as well. To become a true global language a language has to check a few boxes in my opinion (in no particular order): 1. Is it easy for foreigners to speak/understand? 2. Is it easy for foreigners to learn? 3. Is it easy to write in? Chinese fails at basically every single one of those while English doesn't. Let's do the checks for English: 1. Is it easy for foreigners to speak/understand? Most words/sounds in English are quite distinct in my opinion. There are few words that completely change their meaning just because of a mispronunciation. 2. Is it easy for foreigners to learn? Simply yes. It has one article, the alphabet has only 26 letters and the list of irregular verbs fits onto about four DIN A4 pages. 3. Is it easy to write in it? Also yes. You only have to learn/have ways to use 26 letters and a little punctuation and you're good to go. Chinese in comparison has 3500 basic characters but Chinese schoolchildren graduate often knowing 5k-6k but all together there are over 50k. Easy is different. This is the main reason I firmly believe that no "hieroglyphic" language (for the lack of a better word since English isn't my native language either) will ever become a world language in the way English is today.
The way you talk about language with such passion and detail make your videos really interesting. Even if your not planning on learning a foreign language
I dont think that French will overtake English. English is the perfect (european) language to use for a global language because its basically a mixture of many different languages mostly a mixture of the romansh and germanic language family. French is also not as easy to learn because you mentioned that English is a hard langauge but French is definetly as hard as english if not harder because of the various pronounce options etc. In my opinion the humanity will create the perfect productive language wich gives the highest amount of information in the shortest sentences with no relations to any current language.
It depends on if these African countries ever develop into richer countries right now they are the poorest in the world but they are getting better but its the same with Spanish most Spanish speaking countries got too many problems and nobody wants to be like them most English speaking countries have higher living standards another problem for French in Africa is that maybe in the future the Africans will prefer their local African languages and not French its not like in the Americas where the native languages are almost completely gone.
@@belstar1128 The thing is if those french countries want to communicate with anyone other than france they will have to learn english. They will remain poor as long as they speak french. Theres a reason why nigeria and south africa are the richest sub saharan countries by far. French has a much higher chance of decreasing in numbers of speakers of practical french than increasing them. As is the cas in places like quebec.
I once asked a polish friend of mine I'd English is hard to learn. He said yes because you have words that sound like they start with a letter, but then you find out it actually actually startes with a completely different letter. I said like cake. It sounds as if it starts with a k. Then knees sound as if it starts with a n. So English can be hard.
Would love to see you create a video like this on Welsh, specifically how the language has come back from near extinction to becoming the "go to" model for language revival.
I think Catalan or Basque would be a better example. The number of native Welsh speakers is decreasing afaik. Children learn it at school but most don't speak it at home, and most speak English to their friends. The fact that more and more people learn it doesn't mean these will be fluent speakers and transmit it to their children... unfortunately.
Hebrew has to be the top example of language revival. It's has gone from having no native speakers 150 years ago to nearly 10 million native speakers today.
@@adamclark1972uk The revival of Hebrew was done in so particular conditions that it can't be done again for any other language. In a few words: - people from many different countries and who spoke different languages - go to another country to create a new society - most could already read Hebrew - Hebrew is a prestigious language. Nothing to do with the Welsh situation...
@@gerald4013 . Welsh speaking doesn't seemed to have diminished where I live, I often hear kids speaking Welsh and if you phone any public service, the phone will be answered in Welsh.
English has the advantage that it is a very simple language. We often say English is not something you learn it’s something you catch … like a flu. Send you kid to day care, register them in sports, send them to play in the park .., a few weeks later they come home and speak English. Perhaps that simply confirms how widespread the language is. But grammatically it is simpler than most Latin languages that I know and it certainly seems easier than the Asian languages with their many many symbols.
@@thedamntrain what is hard for you may not be hard for someone else. Some people find English hard whereas others don't see a problem learning it. As a native Portuguese speaker, Spanish is a hellish language for me to even try to learn, whereas English just carved its way into my brain really easy. It should be the other way around, but somehow i do find Spanish harder than English, even though it is the sister language of my own native tongue and shares a lot more similarities in between. The thing is, everything depends on which is it your native language and on yourself.
@@thedamntrain i don't think of English in linguistical aspects, but i do agree with you that some things are senseless in English and they could have constructed the language a little bit better in some ways. Haha
Our local variety of French in louisiana was nearly completely stamped out by Anglo Americans and it's been making a revival, primarily among the youth. So you may be on to something lol
Hey, thanks a lot for the video! I'm from one of these African countries where French is a thing (I am from Mauritania). But here's the thing: even though French is required by the education system and is one of the official languages of the country, English still wins because the influence of the internet on young people is much greater than that of the government and schools.
Short answer: because America rules economically. That implies science and tencological invovation. Cultural exportation is also a important part thanks to its huge internal monolingual maket, easy to produce and sell in and out.
@@arolemaprarath6615 do you think people fell in love with english because of harry potter or because of American movies, the UN literally uses miles to measure distance countries are allowed to claim in the ocean
Even Caesar actually spoke in Greek when he said, "The die is cast." Greek was still the language of the upper class and educated during the rule of Rome.
USA has 300 million first language of English speakers, UK 60 million, Canada about 30 million, Australia 25 million, South Africa about 20 million, and NZ 5 million. That's over 400 million (your first language or mother tongue is the language you dream and swear in)
I think the global language has to be easy to understand and learn for most people, thats why i think english and spanish are/were doing very well globaly. French and mandarin on the other hand are quite difficult for most people to learn (espacially mandarin) so i dont see those 2 replacing english anytime soon
English sound have a large deviation from its writing system. Plus the grammar is so complicated, because it belongs to fusional language. On the other hand, Mandarin have the most easiest grammar, because Altaic people invaded and moved into china many times. Thus, grammar was simplified, and most of the grammatical rules have no exception. And Spanish has very systematical writing style and sound. Overall, in my opinion, Chinese, Indonesian,or Spanish is suitable for global language
@@Takuaku867 if it's so suitable why are they not global languages then? I agree with spanish being the second most likely to take off after english. But I dont see the other langauges ever being international.
@@philgamer5280 That’s because the influence of British Empire and America. They invaded many countries, and also they were economic superpower. Thus, people had to learn English. However, recently, China got to be a economic super power. Then many people started to learn it. In east Asia, such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam, if they can speak Chinese, they can enter a good company. I expect that Spanish would be the dominant language in north and south America. however in Asia, Chinese would be the most dominant language in the future. and by some chance, Chinese would be global language, because of its economic power.
@@philgamer5280 It is unlikely Mandarin will be dominant. In Asia there is Malay which uses the same alphabet as English and is spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia. The alphabet that is used by english is also used by many other languages all across the globe. Mandarin alphabet is most isolated to China, The country of Taiwan and a little in Japan, vietnam. Mandarin is only spoken in China and the country of Taiwan it is geographically "isolated" even though alot of people speak it. Even in Singapore with mostly chinese population most of the young generation don't speak mandarin and prefer to communicate in English. Most chinese also add English name to their ID as well. Mandarin require larger font to be readable which makes it take up alot of space ie not efficient visually you can see this problem in road signs. When trying to learn Mandarin you will encounter teacher from china who are spreading CCP/CPC propaganda which is a turn off to learn this language.
I always assumed that English has been popular around the world due to the dominance of the British Empire before the World Wars and the power and influence of the United States after the World Wars. Another thing that has surprised me as a British Canadian having moved to the States is how different American English is when it comes to spelling and writing. I had to go through the odd experience of taking out U's from words where they should be and reversing re's into er's and crap when it comes to grey vs gray I still don't know which one is the correct American spelling
@@brawnbenson552there are other things, whereby we can easily get past them but can cause momentary confusion. For example, in my northern England English if I need to answer a call of nature, I would ask where the toilet is. Stateside it would be more correct to ask where the restroom is. I only actually realised this when working (in England) somewhere with a lot of tourists where English wasn’t their first language. Restroom or washroom was commonly asked, and while I knew what they were referring to without issue due to the influence of American culture, it is not a word I ever use myself and would raise eyebrows if I did towards other people of my kinfolk. Other examples of this are trash/trashcan- not a term I’ve ever used but would understand if someone said to me. Faucet is a word I probably wouldn’t understand at first, here we call it a tap and I don’t think I’ve seen much American media where it’s mentioned.
@@wr2899 tap water is commonly known at least where I live in America as water from the faucet. On the other hand abbreviations can differ, as I had not encountered the abbreviation W.C. as being a toilet (water closet) until I went to Israel back in 1977. (Israel having been under British rule from the end of WW1 to 1948 meant that most signs that are trilingual (English, Hebrew & Arabic) are in British English.
First, I'm Polish, and Polish is my native language. Second, I've studied Rusian and German in shool, as well as English, and I must tell you, that I consider English easiest of those four. I've never studyed French, but I think, that easy to study English is HUGE factor in Lingula Franca terms.
@@Stazzo82 Would you explain how? Genuine question. I found that you can teach all there is to French pronunciation rules in just one class while I studied the same in English for a semester at uni. It might be easier for you to pronounce EN than FR but the rules are so much fewer and straightforward in French in my experience. In all other respects though, English is relatively easy to learn at a level fit for communication and I'm sure that plays a role in its popularity.
I would say an example in india 🤝🏼 that English never fade out because in India there is more than 26 official languages because every state has their own language so as a nation we can't learn all the languages rather we can learn a common language that is English because its easy to learn in india every state has English as a official 2nd language and everyone knows that India is a republic country 🇮🇳✨ it was ruled by a British for long time so here in india lot of English culture and language is spread and also indian modern economy is running through Information technology and well known by everyone in india there are lots of offshore business are getting from US and UK Australia and english speaking countries so final conclusion is : As a big population nation 🇮🇳 we are speaking English so we equal to china so definitely English language will not be fadeout at any stage but one thing we indians all are speak respect our mother tongue and we always speak our language as a first and any language could be a second one. Thanks for reading by statement ❤️😄🇮🇳
One additional fact is that English is the international language of the sea. Seafarers in most cases if English is not their first language have pass a MARLINS fluency test. Every Port for Comms speaks English, Marine Emergency services too. Pilots for port entry etc. By default all ships agents or anyone else involved with ships services needs to be fluent. It's far more reaching than you think. I am a Ships Master and have been at sea for 42 years and everywhere I have been English is the common tongue.
I like and appreciate the thought you put into your videos. I think that English will remain the top language though... especially in our lifetime... through technology and innovation, movies and music, and business.
I'm a native English speaker and I took three years of Spanish in high school, I had to take 40 hours of German when I was in the Army, and I've been working on Welsh and Polish on Duolingo.
Great video. English may not be the easiest language to learn, but French is by no means an improvement. I'm also doubtful that the proliferation of new ideas and compelling media from French speaking sources is going to increase dramatically in the foreseeable future (50 years?) as compared to English; although I'd be pleasantly surprised if it did. Economic opportunity is a big driver of language adoption and in the near-ish term, Africa is certainly poised to offer a lot of that... as an aside I always hoped that a grammatically, phonetically and orthographically simple language, like Korean (I'm not Korean btw), would become a global lingua franca but I don't see that happening anytime in the future.
I think one other thing to mention that might not be so important. Perhaps we could ask, is the current English language gonna be the lingua franca forever? There are already many different dialects and variations of the English language spoken other countries. I wonder if someday, English will be so influential that it would not only be common for foreigners to learn, like in China, but that those same people might create their own variation of English and if the country of these people were to gain a lot of influence and power, like China, maybe their version might become more popular? I don't know, just a quick thought
Very good thought! There's a vowel shift already beginning in a certain part of America... and these linguistic sound shifts take generations to fully develop, so if there's a 'one world English' some day, we're unlikely to be around to witness it. Perhaps our great-grandkids will speak differently to us? I have no doubt that if China rules the world some day, it will be in English -- their own version of it!
Just a few days ago, I was wondering which would be harder to learn French or German. I read that French starts out easy but becomes progressively harder over time while German starts out hard but gets easier over time instead.
@@keidanekeith668 French is easy to read because you can use context clues to figure out what is being said. But spoken French, instead of a feeling like a challenge, it feels like suicide lol
French does not get harder (I’m preparing for a C2 certification exam, so I know the process). It actually gets easier as lots of advanced words in english are borrowed from french
English is the best language to use for contracts and science. Working internationally, contracts in other languages are more difficult to ensure common understanding and ambiguity increases leading to more disputes and breeches in contract. Until another language offers such control and precision, English will remain dominant. Also, international call centers and working in computers, English language constructs and use are at the core. Replacing English will take a long time.
I loved many things about this video, except one thing; you completely ignored Spanish almost entirely, Spanish is a much more easy language to learn than French, French has a complicated pronunciation and letters that are just there and don't sound or sound different than they should sound which makes it complicated while Spanish has a plain set of rules and the pronunciation of the letters never change. Spanish has a major population of native speakers and L2 speakers are on the rise, Spanish speaking countries are increasingly getting more developed and thus the content in Spanish is massive; movies, books, YT videos, Wikipedia articles, music, news and tons of more media. Yeah there's a lot of L2 speakers in Africa and they can make a lingua franca of sorts in a region of Africa, but that's not enough, most of them use and promote their own native languages and make their content in those languages. Spanish is also the second most spoken language in USA and China has been promoting the language extensively. Once some Hispanic countries make it big economically you'll see how the language will have another major renovation for the widespread of its use which is already happening with the growing popularity of Spanish language music and shows, Spain is also the fourth-largest economy in the European Union and after Brexit its power is increasing and you see a lot of their media including the internationally acclaimed show La Casa de Papel known in English as Money Heist. I believe that you have a personal bias towards French because of this, you only showed one somewhat meaningless example to support your whole argument. English will continue to be the global language of the world for quite some time as it's easier to stick with something well established than change it, and with massive countries with L2 speakers like developing India, a lot of Africa's influencing countries, most of Europe, Latin America, Asia and basically most of the internet users globally, also powerful native speakers countries like Australia and Canada and the developing South Africa (which is an African powerhouse), I see it sticking to the first position for the foreseeable future and Spanish in second place, I believe Chinese could enter at the third place but it's extremely complicated and undesirable to learn for most people because of that and the fact that most Chinese conduct their international trade in English. In conclusion, French won't be a global lingua franca anytime soon.
Fully agree. I try to but i don't see an end to English being the most spoken language, let alone being replaced by French or "Chinese" (quote unquote because of different dialects).
@@thedamntrain well we are not in the 19th century. It was a whole different world back then comparing to what it is now. I believe the language that dominates the media and mainstream (in all ways) will always be more attractive than others from this technological era onwards, and at least for now i don't see it being replaced by any other language soon (like growing Korean and others). For me, only Spanish has a minimal chance. Anyway this is just my opinion and i'm no one to decide whether it will continue to or not be the most spoken language in the future. Who knows what future holds in store?
@@RangelGabriel Spanish speakers around the World are also the most likely to improve their English skills. I mean like in the US where a lot of Hispanics are progressively assimilating the English language and spreading it back around. The international business language in Spain is English... In terms of "popular music softpower" the Spanish language is quite important but so much less in terms of technologies, world-wide brands and products, etc.
@@jandron94 i agree with you. If English were to be replaced by any other language, so technology and society as a whole would need to be different. Whether we want it or not, English "rules" technology, and technology owns the world.
As a french I agree. I see no langage replacing english anytime soon. Chinese and French because too complicated, spanish would be an easier choice but unless some new incredible tech is developped in spanish to drive people to learn it I don’t see how it could work
English is definitely the easiest language to learn, at least to have a sufficient level for casual conversations. I speak 5 langages and English was by far the easiest. The hardest one is definitely mandarin, i don’t see how it can spread like english did even if they open up and spread their culture. French (as a native speaker) is also very complicated, both in the grammar, spelling and pronunciation. So unless their is a specific driver to learn it I don’t see it become again lingua franca.
You can't have a closed society and have your language spread. Its just a simple fact, people keep talking about China becoming a world power and Mandarin overtaking English but their citizens can't even engage with foreigners freely online.
I’m Scottish I can speak a little French which was mandatory in Primary school in primary 7 & also in 1st & 2 nd year of high school too. Being our closest neighbours kinda makes sense . I’d love to visit Germany 🇩🇪 one day so have decided to try & learn the basics which I think shows some respect going to another country & speaking their language albeit I won’t be fluent but at least I’ll give it a good go. French is beautiful to listen too also. I can count to ten in Chinese & that’s about it.
Easy to learn for me as a Chinese. SOV structure just like Chinese. I don't know how easy English is until I tried to learn Spanish. OMG, verb conjugation, mood.... confused about what is actually the subject. Me gustas tu, (who like who??)
Thanks to native english speakers' laziness. If not because of english speakers' laziness, english would never dominate as the most used language in the world at all, until now.
@@adrianwakeisland4710 On the contrary, it spread specifically due to our industriousness. Not only in going out and conquering vast areas, but then unlike the other imperialists, actually building them up into prosperous nations which could then work on spreading English further through different mediums. Film, music, the internet, and more.
@@anon8740 you focus only in the anglophobe side, that's why you think english is dominant. Yes, english is commonly used on most aspects you mean like films and internet, but most of them are in Anglic countries. The films, industry and internet in the americas outside anglic areas is Spanish, not English. English is strong only in Anglic north america, pacific regions and africa.
@@anon8740 You didn't know internet is now a multilingual media, not exclusively english. English language suits only in the anglophone country. The fact that majority of the World's population cannot understand and speak english at all is the real sign that English is just THE REGIONAL LINGUA FRANCA, neither a GLOBAL LANGUAGE nor a GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA. English is just like the rest of international languages of the World, it's just a REGIONAL INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE forever, even it has the most number of users of that language in the World.
My two-bob's worth: English is a naturally syncretic language. It has absorbed ancient Greek, Latin (and chunks of later "Latinate" languages), Norse, early German, Hindi, etc.) It also "jargonizes"lots of the new things, unlike, say German, which tends to use long, compound nouns. Take the example of the English word, "dog". It can be a noun or a verb, in many different contexts. English is, in many cases, very "context-driven", mainly because of this widespread use of common words to maintain "compactness". It has long shed a lot of inherited grammatical complexity. Some folk complain about the spelling, but part of that is because of the diverse origins of the language and the other major factor is that that, in its "native" land, it was coalescing ans a language at the same time the written word was being broadly disseminated in PRINT, not in illuminated, hand-crafted tomes. Typesetters and editors basically carved the written language into wooden blocks and ultimately into moveable type and lithograph plates and stones. Not only is English the language of "air-traffic control", but of aviation in general. It is also the key language of mining and petroleum exploration. Conversations on international oil rigs can sound like Shakespeare meets science-fiction gibberish, because it is loaded with technical jargon, but the core is stripped down Thus, the Spanish drill-pusher, the Russian geologist, the Nigerian plant operator and the Mongolian "roughneck" can pass and receive vital information, albeit to the bewilderment of monolingual onlookers. Music is essentially locked into Italian. Soil science is basically Russian. Ballet runs on French. (My local serious ballet company has dancers from all sorts of places. The 'Boss" is a Native mandarin speaker, and there is nothing wrong with his French or English). Some years ago, I was working on a project in Viet Nam. Many of the locals, especially in and around Hanoi, spoke several languages; Cantonese, Russian, French and often several of the fifty-plus "minority / 'hill-tribe" languages. One interpreter was fluent in Tieng Viet, French, Russian and English, with some German thrown in. She was in high demand because not only was she technically fluent, she could reel off jokes in all her languages and "get" the ones told back to her. She was also a certified mechanical engineer! Many of the older "cyclo" drivers in town had multiple languages and, as the business with the US and Australia built up, they were all merrily learning English by 1990. One of them also spoke fluent Japanese, learned from a couple of Japanese military engineers who "stayed behind" in his village after WW2. One other thing about language in Viet Nam is that unlike the "purist" approach of the French or the North Koreans, the government decided that, if the language was going to absorb a steady stream of new words (mostly from English), it would do so in an orderly fashion. Thus, they set up an academic panel to "standardize" the spelling (including tonal diacriticals), and pronunciation.
I think that the new generation are interested in learning Korean and Japanese. Korean is a little bit easier because hasn't 3 ways to say the same thing 😸. On the other hand USA and alla America is becoming more and more Spanish.
Yes, English has become the language of international business. But in many regions like Latinamerica and mainland China if you do not speak the local language you are lost.
Not really, When I visited China, Japan and Korea if i tried to speak the local language (not fluent) to them they prefer to speak English to me. They are more interested to practice english with me.
I have to disagree with the conclusion on the French language. I'm from West Africa though my country of origin is Anglophone (Ghana). There is a growing dissent and tension between France and its former colonies in West Africa( where most French in Africa is spoken). This, coupled with the rising Anglicization of the world and even in modern french itself as well as the presence of Arabic in these countries and the very waning allegiance to France, makes it easy for another language to take its place. For example, in Rwanda (east Africa), after the 1994 genocide and the very terrible response from Belgium (former colonial power) and France, and who some claim fueled the civil war and genocide for their own personal gain, Rwanda switched to teaching English in schools instead of French and now, although French is spoken by some people, English is gaining dominance as the official language. I think French has a hold now in West Africa but Rwanda has shown how easy it is to change an official language, especially when it is not the native language of a lot of people in these countries. After all, these romance languages are only official languages in these countries because they act as a lingua franca for the different ethnic groups with sometimes very different and mutually intelligible languages. Thus, it is so easy to switch to another.
Kagame is ruling back to the Francophone world, as his regime is more and more under scrutiny by the UK and the US. That's why the Secretary General of the Francophone organization is now headed by a trusted Kagame minister (Louise Mushikiwabo), and French language is back on the menu. Africa also contributes a lot to today's Francophone culture, not only in Francophone Africa, but also in France. Words from nouchi (an argot of Ivory Coast) are more and more into the argot of everyday French people, and even reach Quebec (a lot of my friends in Quebec are from Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Cameroon, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria), like Arabic words are already mixed. Music is the main entry gate for Africans to enter global French culture, but also today's most proficient Francophone authors are now in Africa (Goncourt award of 2021 to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, after Marie NDiaye in 2009). Or as the Algerian author Kamel Daoud says it so well: French language is a spoil of war.
I like to think of this as a friendly discussion not a fight. It's interesting to see other views on this topic so I'd have this. I think we can have an objective discussion without anthropomorphizing these countries or bringing whatever reaction they may give. It's just honestly a discussion
@@vennisabarfi958 Why are Africans fussing over European languages. They were all forced upon Africans, sadly. The discussion would be around "how SLAVERY spread English and French"
@28gire I do not deny the joy multilingual speakers have, check I'm multilingual. My point is what's the real reason behind the spread of English or French (let's start with Africa)? It's plainly SLAVERY committed by the British empire (and they've tried to apologize to Kenya for example) The French former colonies were also demanded to speak French and actually still have their money printed in France, The Franc. So I'm just against the TH-cam saying the British liked to move and conquer stuff, as if it's a sport. Lives were lost, the least you can say is to admit it was because of SLAVERY.
While spelling can be problematical, English has the best combination of complex words/ideas with the simplest rules of grammar, especially when it comes to verbs and tenses.
Perhaps i am biased, but working as web developer, i find quite unrealistic that we turn to french, nothing is coded in french. It is true that Africa is a continent of of children, and in next future this will spread french speakers around the globe (and also poverty). Number of people is something, but we must consider also who is ruling the world, where is technology and business... so, I must admit, USA and EU will keep english as lingua franca. It is the new generations of Africans that will learn english to get a job, and live as immigrants elsewhere.
The biggest reason I don't see French eclipsing English anytime soon is because the growth of French is almost entirely in African states that aren't showing signs of being powerhouse economies or cultural influences any time soon. It requires a lot of speakers but also a lot of influence and power to create a lingua franca.
@@zzaronn Canada is primarily English speaking and the vast majority of its cultural exports are English in tongue and that will continue to be the case. France is already a cultural powerhouse but it just can't compete with the anglosphere alone. While francophone African nations may grow in time to be major powers that is far too far in the future to make any useful predictions about French becoming a lingua franca again. We can't forget that English has almost double the speakers in Africa when compared to French at the moment and predicting population growth of the languages so far into the future isn't so easy. If francophone Africa becomes wealthy its population growth will slow. If it doesn't it won't have the influence to produce a lingua franca.
@@404Dannyboy Belgium and Switzerland speak french too. These african country choose French and keep learning it even if they could drop it for a more useful english. But French is used in multiple powerful country, is learned as secondary language in many other country, and is largely used in a growing continent. It still is possible for it to become a lingua franca
@@zzaronn Honestly, more Swiss people spoke fluent English than French when last I visited lol That is ignoring that Switzerland and Belgium kind of dkn't matter on the scale we are talking. All that said, I am not arguing that French can't become a lingua franca again, of course it can. It even has one of the better chances of doing so. What I am saying is that it isn't very likely to become a lingua franca at current pace especially when compared to how strong English is remaining and the future prospects of other languages like Mandarin or Spanish. I would put French's odds much closer to something like Indonesian, Arabic, or Hindi.
Why is English so HARD? 10 Reasons 👉🏼 th-cam.com/video/DrlX-L4o2KM/w-d-xo.html
No it's not Olly 😂😂😏
Is French easier, or just differently hard?
@@keidanekeith668 Agreed it easy to speak basic understandable English and most people are use to heavily accented English not to mention all the spelling tools to translate. Also Japanese and Korean have shot up in popularity due to the all the content coming out. The top studied languages in order are English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Russian, Portuguese.
English difficult? Uhmmm depends on each person and/or the context i guess. For me will be any asian language, with so many frking tones for each vowel
@@southcoastinventors6583 Where did you get that order from? In fact there is no way we can rank languages according to the number of people studying or acquiring them as an additional language...we don't have enough reliable figures to do that, plus the figures and stats we do have for individual languages are often not comparable. And while Korean has seemingly become increasingly popular in recent years (and possibly in recent decades), it's unlikely that more people are studying it nowadays than are learning Mandarin, Portuguese or Russian. When it comes to this kind of rankings the only certainty we do have is that English tops them all :) :)
One feature that will make English hard to knock off its perch is just how easy it is for young people to 'accidentally' learn it by things like playing online games in English or watching lots of US TV. A language that dominates popular media will always win out. This is another reason why mandarin will never displace other Asian languages, let alone become a world language. I'd also not underestimate Spanish - its very widely spoken and in my experience a very popular L2 or L3 all over the world.
A Filipino friend of mine says his younger countrymen speak English - only the elder generations speak Spanish...
@@davidguy209 In northern Vietnam the oldest people speak French. The over 60's speak Russian. The younger people speak English, but now increasingly mandarin.
@@philipdavis7521 curiouser and curiouser :-)
Sadly, according to Wikipedia Spanish only has around 70 million L2 speakers... I wish it had more, but hey, by number of natives it's Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and then English.
Another feature is volumes of scientific literature and programming languages that won't be rewritten soon.
Especially the latter are so much engrained in our current technology that makes is hard to get by without basic knowledge of English.
Unless those fields get really abstract new 'languages' with symbolic descriptions in place of literal ones, there will not be much change.
I'd rather expect the writing to become a little more visual with more use of emoticons and memes as representations instead of abstract written words.
That's a change that will be promoted through the new technological possibilities. Basically a new kind of technoglyphs.
One of the biggest advantages for English to remain the lingua franca is that it is so extremely flexible. It's very easy for words to be added to the English language vocabulary, and there's no gatekeeper of what it means
Many languages also use the same alphabet as english, like Malay, French and etc.
Yes for example the words Ligma and Balls
Society constantly cancelling words every day because someone got mad:
I mean you could say that about any language. The reason why English is the main language is due to European colonization. If india colonized the world, HIndi would be the worlds primary language and we would be adding new vocabulary to Hindi. This idea that only English can be flexible is just brainwashed.
@Dragondude30 I don't think he was saying English was the only language like that, but rather it was one of the ones that is. There are quite a number of languages that are restrictive in terms of both speaking and written
Also, English was the language that started the backbone of the internet and computer science… This helped with the modern English language boom we see today.
Technology
I have met many people from Brazil, Haiti, the Philippines, and Spanish-speaking countries who speak English fluently--and they all told me that they gained their fluency mainly from watching English movies and television.
As a young boy growing up in the 60s,I learn my english just watching the cartoon.
I live near the border country between Spain and Portugal. Virtually every Portuguese person I know, speaks or at least understands English to some extent or other. On the other hand, virtually no Spaniards here speak English. The key difference is all English speaking TV and movies are dubbed into Spanish in Spain, but are in English, subtitled in Portuguese in Portugal. Even those Spaniards that do speak English seem to have very poor pronunciation, mainly because they rarely hear English being spoken. In contrast, the Portuguese seem to pronounce English words exceptionally well.
Except they fucking don't. It's recognisable, I guess.
Hollywood
Anecdote isn't reliable.
They watched English movies, television, and music, but they still had to study it. It takes hard work to learn a language. If you watch something in a foreign language, 95% of it will just be like noise.
A little-known fact about the phrase "lingua franca" is that it didn't originally refer to French. It referred to the language of the Frankish Empire (Charlemagne's domain), which is ironically closer to modern German than modern French.
Frankish, right? Which modern descendants include Dutch and its offsprings.
Because the franks were german tribes, and the gaulish were celtic tribes, so at first the frankish language was germanic and the gaulish language celtic, then the roman empire latinised gaulish, and then the franks invaded it. So French is a mix of latinised gaulish and frankish, that's why original frank is more looking like german than french, I am french by the way
What's your source? Every source I've checked says it comes from Mediterranean lingua franca that was used in the eastern Mediterranean, Sabir.
Not just German but all the Germanic languages including English
It wasn't the language of the Frankish Empire but rather the Franks. The Franks immediately used Latin upon establishing their empire.
I’m not so sure about French. Algeria is one of these francophone countries but each time I visit more and more young people are learning English. Yes, they would know French too but the amount of them learning English grows each time I visit.
Replacing one colonial language for the other.
@@oleander1705 English was never a colonial language in Algeria.
I think that it was definitely because of a combination of the British Empire and the way that popular culture from the Anglophone sphere dominated the world--especially in movies and pop music. Leave the "artsy" stuff to other languages. Nobody does "superficial content" like the US and the UK! (Oh, and parenthetically, there is a lot of wonderful Literature--with a capital L--in English, as well.)
Exactly! Imperialism and slavery… something not to be proud of.
@@ireskin485 yep
The spread of the pop culture is a consequence, not a cause.
@@ireskin485 Exactly...by the way, you forgot militarism :)
@Diego Texeira Definitely a dark side, if you know what I mean!!! 😉
There was a period of hundreds years in Japan when the country was all but closed to travel and commerce with other countries, except for a small contingent of Dutch who were allowed a trading post in Nagasaki. In order to deal with the Dutch, a number of Japanese learned Dutch, which they assumed was also the language of all Europeans. When Japan was finally opened to foreigners, many Japanese who had learned Dutch were surprised that Dutch was not the language of most of the foreigners who came to their shores.
Thats so interesting :000
Yes. The "蘭学者 " were an interesting group of "scholars," who had the mistaken impression that Dutch was a major language in the West. However, I'm not so sure that they were so ignorant that they thought it was *the* major language of Europe.
That’s why they’ve got Huis Ten Bosch. 🇳🇱
@@Mason58654 Back in the 90's, they tried something similar in Hokkaido with a German theme. Using the kitschy and non-German name "Gluck Kingdom." It was a pseudo-German theme park. One of my friends who was from *northern* Germany was offered a job there--but she turned it down, because they wanted her to put on a blond wig and wear some kind of Dirndl that they thought women from Bavaria all wore. :) My impression o f Huis Ten Bosch is somewhat similar.
@@519djw6 Well, I’d been to the real Netherlands myself previously, and I’d say I liked their impression very much so.
English is the #1 language in the world because the two Greatest World Powers in Their Era of the last 200 years were both English-speaking. The Brits spread English far and wide, from India to Australia to Burma to Africa to the Americas. And then the United States became the greatest economic power in the world, so their currency and language both became important globally, building even further on what the British Empire had done.
not really
@@acidspit14literally what happened, Britain spreader the language with our empire then after our empire dismantled, or just after ww2, the USA became the great power with English as their main language, with their culture spreading across the western world, so basically since pax Britannia and now Pax Americana the language has become the most popular lingua Franca only way this changes is with technology which with ai could translate
Nonsense
@@acidspit14bruh
Because of bloodshed and brutal colonial oppression. That is the true answer people might not want to hear. Everywhere the British came ashore, they left destruction in their wake. The same goes for the linguistic genocide they committed from Ireland to Australia and from the US to Nigeria. All those places had beautiful languages before the English came. Linguists call English the ‘killer language’. Scholars predict between 50 and 90% of all languages will have died out before 2100, the main reason being English. Even to this day, the British government spends millions of pounds spreading English through their post-colonial schooling system. The only way we can stop further damage is by first collectively acknowledging there is an unwanted and undeserved lingual hegemony and dismantling that hegemony. I hope that translation technology, allowing us to all speak our mother tongues, will be the savior of languages facing extinction. Just don’t tell the Brits before they kill it too.
Media definitely plays a huge part. Immersion is an important factor when it comes to becoming fluent in a language.
If you can't move to the country which speaks your target language, then the internet (movies, tv shows, video games, TH-cam videos) is the only way you can gain immersion.
And English speaking nations produce more content available world wide than others. I wonder if Chinese would spread more, were it not for government censorship?
I think the other obstacle with Chinese is the script
@@storylearning Still, some languages did manage to become lingua francas in the past despite their complex, unpractical scripts
@@storylearning The script is not that hard.
Yea Japanese and Korean are popular languages to learn among young people now i think china could have been similar if they had democracy but with 10x more stuff coming from there.
Well, it is important to remember that when we are talking Mandarin Chinese, we are not only talking Mainland China but also Taiwan & Singapore (both do not have government censorship like Mainland China does), so, I still believe that Mandarin has a chance. That being said, Taiwanese & Singaporian content still needs to be intentionally sought out. I do believe belstar though that Japanese & Korean seems to be taking media by storm at the moment.
My theory (in short):
The rise of English as a global lingua franca started with the British Empire, which, at its height, covered around 25 per cent of the world. English holds onto its status because of the cultural and economic dominance of the USA.
It never fails to amaze me how much young people in non-Anglophone countries want to learn English - it's seen as 'cool' and a means of getting ahead in life. It's this natural and uncoerced zeal to learn English (particularly among young professional types) that will perpetuate it as a global lingua franca.
The sad flipside is, many look down on their own language because it represents 'no' economic or professional value. I can't help but feel lucky that I'm a native English speaker, but also wish I felt the same onus and pressure to study other languages to even the playing field.
Greetings from Australia!
that's what he said. you're just paraphrasing.
@@Hadrianus01 I mean it's not really too shocking that other young people see English as cool. Most clothing you buy has English on it, most movies and music are in English, most of the more successful nations are Anglosphere/English speaking nations. I could say a lot more, but it's late and I'm tired lol.
I think English as a lingua franca is also a result of the importance of scientific work in the US after world war 2. English is my 3rd language but i am glad that it was thought to us in school in a certain level, otherwise i would be like dependent on translations f.e. of medical scientific papers to German. But I must admit that I am not very comfortable with talking so I would prefer if Spanish would surpass English in the US 😅 maybe then things may change
@@Hadrianus01 English has Latin alphabet, which is easier than most other writing system.
Easy to use writing system is a huge advantage.
Which make Arabic, Chinese, etc as not a good candidate for Lingua Franca.
So, English only has to worry about other Latin Alphabet using languages.
My wife is a native Spanish speaker, but was taught exclusively in Italian in elementary school. She was also taught English in high school. We are now living in Spain and Catalan is slowly working its way into her brain. She's told me in the past that English was the easiest to learn. It is so engrained in her that she thinks in English.
Aside from spelling, she's right. English mostly nouns are gender neutral, thus only one 'the' (unlike el, la, los, las, in Spanish or der, die, das in German). English adjectives stay the same regardless of the noun ... one green house, two green houses. Conjugation of verbs is much simpler. The only case suffix is the possessive 'apostrophe s'. The biggest problem I'v run into in helping others le(a)rn English is spelling. Clean that up a bit, and English wd grow even stronger.
A common misconception about Mandarin speakers is the number of native speakers vs non-native; Actually China, Singapore and Taiwan have many people who speak Mandarin but their real native language is a dialect of Chinese which can be VERY different from Mandarin or even something else like Taiwanese Aboriginal languages etc.
@@thedamntrain I agree. In an extreme case Taiwan Hokkien is often called a Chinese dialect but it borrows so much from Japanese etc that it is only 70 percent the same as Hokkien in Fujian. Far less than say Dutch and German...
That is why they still don't use Simplified Chinese Characters!
While that is true I believe that Mandarin is increasing its influence within China similar to what you saw in France or Germany in the past.
@@Perririri No. Actually the meaning/way of saying a word can be different between dialects but can be written in simplified or complex. A good example of this is that in GuangDong they will usually use simplified but complex/traditional characters in HK and Macau where they also speak the same language (Cantonese). That said we have words that are specific to dialects and can not be written. Cantonese has some characters that are in common use but are specific to it and not really understood by Mandarin only speakers. In Hokkien as used in Taiwan it is really just a spoken language and thanks to the sound based borrowing from Japanese it is basically impossible to write a lot of words. Where it gets really strange is we have a lot of words that went from English to Japanese to Taiwan Hokkien and are sort of able to be understood in context if you can speak English (I am a citizen of Taiwan but I am part of the 30 percent plus that is not a background Hokkien speaker but my English is fine).
For the younger generations, that is less and less so. The numbers of living native speakers of non-Mandarin Chinese languages are still big, but the average age of those native speakers is high. Mandarin is more and more the mother tongue of Chinese people in the PRC, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia.
I’m Australian born Chinese but I think English is underestimated in its beauty. Another factor to its success would actually be its simplicity, and it allows people to focus less on the language, but more in science and creativity.
As an ABC, thats crazy your parents immigrated to Australia over the US.
Calling english simple is wild
My favourite story of the dominance of English is about am airline pilot in Germany and the air traffic control people insisted on speaking English despite, of course, being native German speakers. The German pilot asked why he, a German flying in German air space, should be speaking English. To which a British pilot responded with “because you lost the war!”
Brilliant lol
twice*
legalizujete násilie lebo aj Rusi vyhrali vojnu
English is actually required universally for all pilots and ATCs so that there is quick and effective communication in the event of an emergency and normal interactions. That way, you touch down on your wheels instead of a flaming hole in the ground. Imagine a German air controller talking in German to a Delta plane coming in from JFK to an American pilot. If they can't communicate, things get bad fast. But yeah, losing the war twice doesn't give you a lot of say in things. ;)
@@panachevitz I'm surprised the German didn't respond with, "Ja, but vee vonn ze vurld cup four times."
Sitting near the front of the cabin of a Dash 7 aircraft at a remote airport in northern Scandinavia once I was able to hear much of what the pilots said and, to my surprise, all the communication between the pilots and the tower was in English.
English is a mixed blessing because it has given me the opportunity to communicate and form relationships with people from other cultures that would not have been possible otherwise. Also, because of the Internet.
The downside is I feel like English at times plays a dominant role in communicating. For example, I seen people in the language community in particularly Western European countries say, instead of speaking their mother tongue, it’s a mix of their native language and English words as a replacement.
For me, I do hate the fact English is my native tongue due to political conflict I hear and see in it disgusts me. The "cancel culture, woke culture, social justice ".... All of that is in English, the only exception was saw a very similar thing in polite speech Japanese, but was more of a cry for censorship. Of " think of the children ". English for me, despite being a native, I loan a lot of Latin language words. Keep an older syntax. I have saw a rise of " me " being in front rather than I. Which bugs the shit out of me as it comes off rude. There is a loosening of " I VS. ME " in the USA. I would say my English is internationally influenced, but mainly online. I find English is more of a language of conflict. The pronoun system getting mixed with honorifics within some circles. Where it's demanded with X statement of " him/her, she/her ". I don't see the point of a breaking a perfectly fine grammartical gender system. I find that's the beauty of other Germanic and Latin languages. You can condense and convey more specific information via those methods with markers for what the word is and meaning. Asian languages don't, but convey more meaning when written, but is pitch heavy but can convey more specific information via context.
@@MaoRatto Well, I try and look at it like it would not matter because if I lived in a European country especially, a Western European country I would have to learn English anyway non the less. I just wish maybe when I was growing up there would have been more opportunity to learn them in my country instead of just English and French. I speak more than one but probably after English, I am most comfortable with speaking Russian (speaking) not writing, Spanish, and French. Furthermore, Russian is a hard language but I like it because it is unique to any other language. Also, part of my background is Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish so, all the more reason to learn.
Same here in California we speak in a mix of Spanish and english
@@MDobri-sy1ce M'i, disappointed with mainly the people whom speak it. I hate the social conflict associated with it. Rather than the language of it. English as a language is a fine tongue, but culturally destorys everyone else like a virus. It's a real shame. If didn't have " political correctness, wokeness, and social justice " activism that it associates with. I would be fine it. I do love how Slavic languages have their own unique scripts to write in. As it feels like a proper alphabet, but... I prefer a syllable based system where 1 letter + vowel combinations / pitches.
@@forgottens7712 I can tell you, further south you go on the east coast. You will hear more spanish loan words, or the pronouncation is more akin to Mexican Spanish. When my co-workers say shut up, ( my co-workers do understand me responding in shut up please )... Typicaly loan " Catt'e por vor! " (My Linux PC's keyboard hasn't been optimized to use special letters ;( . )
Though English in the eastern south region gets softer. Though got a bad habit of mixing I's and Me's where they do not belong. Me is a plural and goes after ( your friend/family/co-workers ). I swear English is getting more basic or simplified. A lot of my vocab is closer to a romance language than the standard which is probably due to the fact of heavy exposure to Latin / Romance language words from music, education, and come in close proximity with Spanish speaking artists online....
Trying to figure out why the Spanish / Brazilian speaking world has such kick ass artwork, same with East Asia.
Your video is quite thought-provoking, thank you for taking the time making it.
I'm French and I teach English in middle and high school, I was actually looking for a video for my class to explain why so many people speak English around the world but unfortunatly, this is way too fast for them. However, I've been quite surprised with what you said at the end : French becoming the number 1 language and English being not so easy to learn. Very unexpected as I believe English grammar is super easy and English vocabulary is all around us (through media). Sure, it can be hard to pronounce but that's it - I will watch your other video to see if you can convince me. I truly believe that French is way harder to learn, so many things make no sense at all. If you ever make the same video but shorter and slower, I will definitely show it to my pupils. Keep up the good work. :)
Hi Caroline, he does talk very fast. Slow it down to 80% speed then show your class.
@NEEJER
Why would you have a profile pic like that? Especially when the person you're replying to is French.
I am learning Spanish. Before I found this video, I noticed that all the Spanish learning videos I watched, the persons can speak perfect English while we English speakers are struggling to learn one. So I do agree with this video.
What sucks is because English is so popular, I can never practice my French and Spanish when I travel. When people hear me try to speak another language, they automatically speak English, and others would want to practice English with me. Ah well, I still enjoyed my vacations!
Edit: Yes, once in a while, people will speak to me in their native language. In fact, in Canada, I had a secretary teach me French!
Yes, and that’s why I think travelling abroad to learn a language is overrated. Better to study from home until you’re good enough to hold your own when you travel. There is such a thing as the curse of the English speaker!
The locals probably have a hard time understanding some tourists because of the tourists' accents and/or lack of command of the language. But it's fine to say hello and such.
@Don Ricky I'm not scared to speak another language. Yeah, I may mess up, but it's good practice. Anyways, best wishes to you and your Spanish!
I'm sure, "I'll be home late, darling, my secretary is teaching me French" has been used before! 😀
You stand a better chance of avoiding responses in English if you converse with people who live and work away from the cities.
One other consideration is that when English was imposed on various conquered countries, in some places people ended up favoring it because there were so many different native languages. This is particularly true in India and the Philippines, where the various native tongues are mutually incomprehensible.
Making mother tongues home exclusive and removed from any public spaces completely. Same happened in Nigeria and South-Africa, where pretty much no one speaks English as its first language. It is beyond sad.
IMO, highly tonal languages like Mandarin are unlikely to become lingua francas because people raised in syllabic systems will just have too much trouble learning proper enunciation.
I'm starting to study Chinese now and I have to say, the tones aren't that bad and once you get them, you get them. The thing I realize that will ensure Chinese doesn't dominate is a combination of the writing system and, just as bad, the lack of loan-words. There are very few loanwords in Mandarin and it just doesn't evolve. American standard English is the opposite: picking words from another language and adding them into the mix is no problema. Even Mandarin words and terms feng shui, yin and yang, tao, chop chop and wumao.
@@rumrunner8019 Mandarin also require bigger font to be readable and it is a very slow to write language.
@@nsevv Who ðe hell writes on paper in ðis day and age? Writing Mandarin on a keyboard is even easier ðan English.
What makes you think English is not tonal?
As an Englishman tone of voice can change meaning of a sentence.
But hey tonal languages are always hard right?😊
Trying to speak a language is hard enough but, have you ever tried to understand the written Chinese? Even Chinese children take 7 years to learn at least 10,000 characters by study in order to read a Chinese newspaper! And I was told that by a Chinese teacher.
Tunisian here and I'm seeing more and more of the youth gravitating towards English (but French is still a big part of their lives through school etc.)
This video absolutely floated my boat: history, language, geopolitics, futures, animation, and confirmation that all the duolingo time I'm putting into learning le français is not going to waste. Subbed!
I’m not convinced about French being the world’s most dominant language, maybe make a shorter video sequel to this if you haven’t already
Especially as they gained all the linguistic power at the same time as Britain so it’s not any new hing really
Because English is "composed" of 30 to 40% French "vocabulary".
Yeah the sun will set on the English language one day but just because French is big in north Africa doesn't mean much when English is in much of Africa itself in Addition to all parts of the world.
@@marc-andrechevrette3420
But the simplest, most commonly used words are Anglo Saxon(99 of the top 100, for example) . Also the articles, prepositions, pronouns....
Having a layer of French /Latin nouns, in addition to the Old English and Old Norse Germanic, leads to a huge available vocabulary.
@@guppy719 French is in Central Africa and North Africa that's what make it the lingua Franca of Africa in the future, and since China have big interest in Africa the entire Chinese population will learn French instead of English
Another big barrier to Mandarin or Hindi becoming a lingua franca is that those languages' base is only in one or two nations. English became established through colonialism in dozens of regions across the world (Australia, India, Africa, east Asia, the Caribbean, etc), which allowed a more regional spread. For instance, for people from, say, Indonesia, English wasn't just a language spoken popularly europe or north America, but in Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia (and NZ, haven't forgotten you). This meant that regional power centers would operate in English, spreading it outwards from that source as well as the original source, the UK.
many asian countries are starting to teach mandrin as second language in their countries , but mandrin is alot harder then english
@@sakurakou2009 yeah the difficulty is another barrier
@@sakurakou2009 Although I would say Mandarin is the second most useful language across Asia on average, it is pretty much useless outside of Asia other than in a few Western countries with large Asian populations (Canada, NZ, Australia...). Russian has a much larger geographic sphere of influence (eg for most of Eastern Europe, Mongolia and quite of Stan's countries like Khazakstan) and Spanish or Portugese have at least one country on a few continents which use these languages so although I speak Mandarin, English and some local dialects I still expect to use English as my default language outside of a few Asian countries for as long as I live...
@@naguoning Mandarin is mostly useless in asian countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Phillipines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and other asian countries. Population wise it might seems like alot in Asia are speaking Mandarin but they are all in China, so it is only useful in China and the country of Taiwan. You can use it in Singapore but most here prefer to speak English, English being the 1st language being taught here in schools, Tamil, Malay and chinese are taught as 2nd language. Most Singaporean pass the GCSE O'level english.
Among all the Asian languages Malay is easiest to learn since it uses English alphabet. It is spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia (Bahasa Indonesia (similar to malay) ) Trying to learn Mandarin you will encounter many teachers especially those from china trying to push the CCP/CPC influence and agendas.
@@nsevv My Mandarin is very much Taiwan style. I hate the CCP!!! I personally found Mandarin useful enough in some parts of Malaysia and Indonesia because so many businesses there are run by ethnically Chinese people. Although I am a Taiwan citizen I am part of the five percent or so that is not of ethnically Chinese origin so people outside of Taiwan tend to not use Mandarin with me unless they hear me speak it. I was surprised to find it was actually very useful in Cambodia. Again because so many businesses were run by Chinese people. In Vietnam, the Philippines, Thailand English is certainly more useful. The difference with Chinese in Cambodia was I could have quite in depth conversations where as the English used was virtually always quite basic. I don't for a second doubt that English is the most useful language in Asia overall but I think Mandarin is next in usefullness within Asia.
7:00 Having a single unified language is one of the best things that can happen to the world. Communicating helps bring us together. The loss of diversity is sad on the one hand, but uniting people is a worthwhile cause
Yeah Language is one of the bigger naturally unifying forces. Look how close the USA and UK are after getting off on the wrong foot. The language naturally brought them back together. It comes down to how much value each language intrinsically has and there is no right answer. Hell you could argue that its similar when losing dialects yet most people don't lament their death.
It's not possible
I also think exactly the same way!!!
We need a common language to exchange share our culture our knowledge to each other
Not worth it. Our diversity and character as humans is based on culture and language. A single language would wipe out so much of that, the world would be a far poorer place for it. Having said that people being multilingual would make for a better world.
A common language we can all speak is not as big a threat to other languages as you might think. The Netherlands has more English proficiency than Canada ... but walk down a Dutch street in a residential neighborhood and you will struggle to hear any English at all.
You hit the nail on the head when you talked about money. The USA, UK, Aus, Canada NZ, Ireland, Singapore are all rich countries. However by that logic it’s going to take a very long time for French to take over. Outside of France and Quebec,most francophone counties are poor, providing less incentive to learn the language and I don’t see the economic output of the Congo overtaking the US any time soon.
Geography also plays a massive role. English is spoken widely across many continents. Spanish is primarily useful only in Latin America, it’s not going to help much in Asia or Africa…and Chinese is kinda useless outside China and it’s immediate vicinity.
So I see Belgium, Switzerland, and Monaco have been forgotten. I dont know how economically sound the other Francophone countries are
There are more than 1.5 billion Chinese in the world. 1.4 live in China. While 100+ million live aboard.
@Esneyk nebulous Where did you see that 70 million people speak Spanish in Europe?
@Esneyk nebulous no they don’t. Who in Europe speaks Spanish?!? 1 little county, Spain. The rest of Europe speaks foreign or English
@@LucasFernandez-fk8se You... You do realize that no matter where you live any language that is not your own, is a forgein language. Any language that you do not speak regularly can be called foreign. THIS INCLUDES SPANISH
The Latin speaking parts of Europe never stopped speaking Latin. The Latin just naturally evolved as all languages do, and different varieties got different names like Spanish, French, Romanian, etc.
Latino aka conquistadore aka Catholics, the old enemy of the British empire. English is a language of culture and freedoms and Latin a language of enslavement and misery. That's why English defeated all other languages. Because it is a superior language and upholds the principles of humanity and greatness.
@@notinterested8452 Do you take drugs? Because looking at your comment I don't doubt it
@@panjacek2273 because you are not English you will never understand. You can't even speak or read English and yet you dare to question my authority?
@@notinterested8452 tf you on about you don't know what language that person speaks . I disagree with you and my native language is English and I am British and my parents are British and so are their parents and so are their parents. All languages are just languages if you can convey a point to somebody else it really doesn't matter. Why not just let people speak what language they want and stop acting like any one language is superior if it isn't . A superior language would be something that has very distinct pronunciation for each word, words are short , and it actually makes sense grammatically .
@@notinterested8452 In a new year I wish you a nice stay in a psychiatrist hospital. High five!
English is cool because it has influence from multiple different language groups. Romance, Germanic and even a little Greek.
Although I would like this to be true since I'm a native french speaker, I have doubt about french becoming a lingua franca for the world unless the Académie Française in France makes major change to the language. For non native french is hard to learn and for everyone, even native french speaker, it is hard to write it correctly. On the other hand, english is very easy to learn and you can become proficient within 2 to 3 month. I think that in the futur (like 200 or 300 years) the language of the American continent will transform into some kind of spanish/english, a spanglish if you will. The language will be composed of English terms, laced with Spanish and Portuguese and probably hardly understandable for today's people. That or we'll communicate telepathically with images, thoughts and feelings. Who knows! Cheers to all and Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas!
If reforming French was an issue that mattered enough to people, they could get it done without wasting a single second on the Académie. The Académie has no legal authority to set any standards for the language. None at all. Just a bunch of silly old sods cosplaying 17th-century nobles and yelling "get off my lawn" to an empty front porch.
I think you're correct
The future lingua franca will be memes, end of the discussion.
@@mattsavigny6084 😂😂
I think the map you used shows why French won't become a lingua franca. Even though its the official languages for a lot of those countries on that map, less than a third of most of their respective populations are francophone
Having traveled quite a bit of the world, I don't see English being knocked off its perch. The language is infectious and very easy to learn despite some of the difficulties(spelling)
French has its issues as a language which act as a barrier to learning. I see it in Canada, Quebec is starting to lose it's french and they are hard-core protectors of their language.
Yeah, English is very easy to learn to an intermediate level, but surprisingly hard to be perfect at. So many exceptions to rules, and different root languages making pronunciations irregular. But even if you do get those wrong, it's usually still easy enough to understand your meaning.
@@________________.. yeah, that was basically what I mean :)
I think that the extreme flexibility of the English language in terms of its ability to form patois and creoles in localities where non-native speakers live gives it a greater edge over French, or other European languages with their versions of the Académie Française.
Patois should be seen as a different language in its own respect. Native English speakers without the relevant ancestry have much trouble understanding it.
French creole exists in places like Mauritius and the Seychelles.
That ability is intrinsic to all languages of the world. Even a hardly rigid language such as latin evolved in new variations, namely the romance languages
@@peterc.1618 And the entirety of the French speaking Caribbean
@@peterc.1618 French Creole exists in the US but barely because the government banned teaching it in schools for years and shammed it’s speakers.
I've always thought it was the combination of the British Empire's former reach and the United States influence as the most influential superpower especially when it comes to media and culture such as books, shows, movies, music, etc. that makes English a very dominant language.
Yep I htink that is what he said.
Books ?😂
I've worked in several companies who employed people from all over the world. It was quite amazing to speak with people from Russia, Indonesia, Ireland, France, and other countries, and learn about their customs. We all understood each other well because everyone was speaking English.
The next lingua franca will not be French, Mandarin or Spanish. It will be a descendent of English. Not English as we understand it today, but a mutated form that adheres to ease of pronunciation across multiple cultures.
Mha man, just read my mind.
Like how latin seperated into multiple languages I think ur right but back then people didn't have the internet so maybe it won't spread to many languages if the world is connected
Exactly. Just look at Singapore English, Jamaican Patois, or the Pidgen of Polynesia.
I hope the spelling changes too, because S and C shouldn't sound like each other. And the letter Z "needz to be uzed" more often. And there's some other things i would want English to change for the better lol
I agree, I think it would evolve more as one since it's hard nowadays to isolate cultures due to globalization and the internet. I noticed that British and American english at one point were slowly separating, but due to globalization it started merging again. Also within British provinces and American states, local accents are starting to die out, which if industrialization never happened would have transformed into their own languages. It's happening in my country too, where we adopt slang from halfway across the world because of the internet. The next lingua franca would be a new language in which the languages of the most dominant entertainment-exporting countries reign.
I think it will be difficult for another language to supplant English because of the Network Effect. You can read about the Network Effect on Wikipedia. Speaking of Wikipedia and the network effect, there are more in-depth articles on the English Wikipedia than on any other language's Wikipedia.
That's an example of the network effect: There is greater utility in learning English because there is more English content on Wikipedia; and for each person who chooses to learn English for this reason, there is a chance such a person might one day choose to contribute to the English Wikipedia, thereby causing the amount of English content to expand even further, and further increasing the utility of English. A spiral. A snowball.
I speak of Wikipedia as an example, but the same can be said for other things: movies, media, scientific papers, ...
Networks are like chains though and all chains are broken sooner or later...plus we should not forget that Wikipedia and lots of other knowledge and "intellectual creations" currently available in English cannot be accessed in the People's Republic of China...
I think in the distant future English will be similar to how Latin was in the year 1500 where nobody speaks it as a first language anymore but it will still be dominant in science and other high end things also about Wikipedia the English Wikipedia has been really disappointing me recently a lot of other language articles turn out to be more in depth and have info that is not in English but most people don't know enough languages to find the best one since its quite random which is the best.
@@belstar1128 We will see. English became the main language of science fairly recently (namely in the interwar period and, most notably, after WWII) and, to the best of my knowledge, only established its dominance in this field once for all in the 1980s with the spread of personal computers and the demise of the Soviet Union. You see, it all happened fairly quickly. I cannot see any reason why another language (or other languages for that matter) could not take over this role from English equally quickly. Indeed, in the late 1880s most scientific journals were in German, with English a close second, and even as late as 1920 German was still the most prominent language of science worldwide despite Germany having lost the war...
@@belstar1128 meaning, no global language or global lingua franca exist. English is always be a REGIONAL LINGUA FRANCA just like the rest of the lingua francas Worldwide.
Most wikipedia articles are just auto translated to other languages these days, that's a pretty bad example
I feel like the biggest factor in spreading the popularity of the language has to do with Disney/Marvel and American video games, but they're slowly becoming terrible due to wokeness and blatant ideological propaganda so it won't last
Whilst some elements of English are hard (strong verb past tenses, spelling), in fact it is one of the easiest languages to make oneself understood in either written or verbal: -
1. Latin script, minimal diacritical marks.
2. Little inflexion of nouns or verbs.
3. No declensions or conjugations.
4. No grammatical gender.
5. No agreement of adjectives or articles.
6. Virtually no artificial tenses - e.g. subjunctive little understood or used by native speakers.
A non-native speaker may struggle to understand a native (e.g. "I will not" can be "I'll not", "I won't" or even "I ain't"), virtually any phraseology the non-native uses will be understood by a native speaker.
This is just compared to Indo-European languages, other languages with their ideographic scripts, tonal speech etc. are much more difficult - e.g. Japanese, which requires far greater study for natives than English.
Perhaps this is the reason so many choose English as their second language - it is the easiest to learn...
And this makes it highly suitable to writing of contracts and technical specifications which is why even Chinese companies prefer to use English outside of their own country. The Finnic languages would also probably fit this mold but we never conquered anything.
In his book, BABEL NO MORE, Michael Erard states that 70% of the English speakers worldwide, English is not their first language. Making English the only language with more non-native speakers than native ones.
Interesting.
French also has more L2 speakers than native ones.
@@soundscape26 total number of french speakers Worldwide (including the least proficiency in French) is just half of the total number of native Spanish-speakers.
@@adrianwakeisland4710 I know yes, I was referring to that book's claim that English is the only language with more non-native speakers than native ones.
False. Swahili has a handful of natives yet the majority have never even met a Swahili person. L1 speakers could be in the tens of millions yet L2 and L3 has hundreds of millions.
If I try to practice my Spanish with a native Spanish speaker, there is a near 100% chance that their English is better than my Spanish, so then I just feel rude for communicating in a clearly less efficient way. The ubiquity of English makes it so much harder to learn anything else!
I've never had much trouble communicating with native Dutch speakers in their first language despite the fact that their English was usually better than my Dutch though...and it has been all worth it by the way!
What spanish speaking countries have you been to? Having in lived years in latin America that is absolutely not true. To live in latin America you HAVE to know Spanish. I met almost nobody who could speak English outside of obvious tourist traps.
@@matthewosborn1123 perhaps I'm wrong, but in my experience quite a lot of non-tourist spots in puerto rico have tons of english speakers! It could just be the USA's influence being especially strong over there, there's a lot of anglicismos...
@@ourtube1128 Puerto Ricans are US citizens
Now imagine trying Danish or Tagalog.
My Hungarian friend said that he did not fault Americans for speaking only 1 language. The countru is big and so much happens here. In Europe, multiple languages are useful, within a short distance people speak other languages, so motivation and opportunity exist. For Americans, Quebec or Mexico is the closest opportunity. As you said, so many speak English everywhere, so its just human nature.
Depends on where in the USA you live. In New York, parts of Texas, Florida, California there are large Spanish speaking communities.
Looking at long term lingual dominance, like 500+ years from now or something, we'll probably see a seemingly alien version of English. As many people learning it as a second language, often including words and/or sounds from their first language. With the connectivity of the internet, and popularity of other widely spoken languages, we might get a cool English-like smoothie
English accents have changed incredibly since the 1950s. They are still localised, but many dialect words have fallen into disuse. The Cockney accents of the East End of London, and the dialect rhyming slang that went with them, sound very different to the Cockney English of my grandmother. We are in for another Great Vowel Shift, sses are much more sibilant, inflection has changed at the ends of sentences. And the pitch of American English is much higher than it was even twenty years ago.
Future English may be globally intelligible in 400 years, but you and I would find it difficult to follow.
I could imagine a blended, creole version of English with like Spanish, Italian, etc. mixed in there, the next evolution of the language is coming on the horizon, maybe in 100 years or so we will start to see it happening
@@danielzhang1916 The hispanic effect on the language will be far greater in the USA than in Britain.
When I was young girl, I thought that lingua franca should be the language of the biggest country, so I thought it should be Russian. I was so confused and a little dissapointed because I thought it would be much easier to learn Russian (as a Serbian speaker), but I had to learn English
Well at least you’ve learned it well enough for us all to understand 🥰
@@hansgruber788 Yes, I'm very satisfied with my knowledge of English. It's very useful to know any foreign language, especially English. When I started learning (I was 7) it was difficult to read and write and to pronounce some words and I didn't like it that much, but now when I know English enough to be able to comunicate with other people it's incredible feeling. I also know French, but I don't speak Russian 😂
@@amabarbigrl thats very cool, i'm English and i can just about speak a couple lines of french lol
Well Russia was and still is a lingua franca to the former Soviet Union and used to be in the communist nations.
Yes, Russian should be the Lingua Franca!
English is also used by other countries that don't speak each others language. For instance airline pilots, ship captains, etc...I recently was watching a show about airport police in Spain. When they would come across someone who didn't speak Spanish, the first thing they would ask is "do you speak English?" And more times than not, they did.
English has imperialism as the main reason, but this leads to some key things that separate it from the other imperial languages
1. Media influence [English dominates the internet, 'nuff said]
2. Vast geographical spread [not confined to Africa only or the Americas only or The North only, English has a presence in lots of places.]
3. Slowly spoken pace [It's not spoken very fast, so it's not hard to find the spaces between words and actually get the rhythm. This is offset by contractions, but not by much. Too many languages [but not Mandarin] speak at 600 kph. English is not one of them [except maybe the New York or Irish dialects].
4. Native Speaker Attitude [The meanies likely don't have a fallback language, and the nice ones are super polite and willing to help, and both are likely very literate and won't shut up. No introversion, no condescending cutting off to another language, and lots of concepts to explore for the curious...but this plays into media again]
5. Easy-to-learn-hard-to-master grammar and syntax [no cases, no conjugations, no genders, no weird verb-goes-here-with-this-conjunction [Hallo Deutsch] or this-adjective-goes-before-noun-but-this-one-after [Hola Espanol]...but there are enough exceptions left over to make you question.]
6. Borrowed words galore [This is why spelling and pronunciation are hard, but it also means you can probably find a cognate in there somewhere and pronounce it mostly like your own language...you'll have to battle other people's cognates, but that's a good bond too.]
you explained it perfectly!! especially on 3,4 and 5 (coming from an irish person too ahahh)!!
Pity he speaks so fast...it's not a problem for me but for non-native speakers it must be close to being unintelligible.
Just because the language centres of the brain work at 2x speed doesn't mean your mouth has to!! Select a lower gear next time....
Most overlooked is the World Wide Web being made by an Englishman. To program/code, you still need English. Considering the success of the web, it set a future precedent.
What do you mean NY and Irish dialects are spoken particularly quickly? Is there any evidence for this on average because that strikes me as bullshit, could be wrong though
Tea
Sometimes I think about the english words that are used in programming and I wonder if in the future, in case programming doesn't change its core drastically, programmers will see those word as relic of the past that are no longer used outside their field or who knows what else
English has a lot of inertia in science and tech at this point; ironically just like a programming language doing a refactor/translation in another when you've already written so much in the original would be super difficult 😀.
Its going to be like latin was a few centuries ago not really a spoken language but it has a lot of impact and will be found in text form for millennia.
TRON
I can tell that English isn't your first language
@Rafael Santana Englsih hasnt changed much since shakespeare so there is not much chance it will change drastically in the next 500 years. If people can still understand shakespeare now they will probably still be able to in the next 500 years.
One big reason is that English is a forgiving language, in that you can get by with speaking it badly. There's so many varied English accents and dialects and native English speakers are used to foreign people speaking bad English so you don't need to be precise. I've learnt a few languages and none of them come close to English with how native speakers don't care so much about imprecise pronunciation, jumbled grammar and generally being patient when conversing with someone who speaks English badly. The goal is to communicate and be understood, that's mostly it. With other languages they look at you as if you're from another planet if you mispronounce one word slightly.
That is why it will never end.
English is the 3rd language we start learning in school in my country. I’m quite please with knowing English. It’s an interesting language imo. I prefer it over French. It’s much more difficult for me to pronounce than English, and is even more difficult to spell. Probably because all of the languages I’ve studied are Germanic languages, except for Spanish, and that was difficult for me to learn. Studied it for 1 year, and can’t even hold a very basic conversation in it anymore, after a few years.
Just a guess, are you from Lebanon, Belgium or Switzerland?
@@Blaze6432 I’m from the Faroe Islands. We are a part of the Kingdom of Denmark, so we are required by law to learn Danish as well as our native Faroese language. English is then added on at the 4th grade (was 5th grade when I went to school) because of its usefulness in international relations. 🙂
@@Lemonz1989
English is also quite closely related to Danish, though the Frisian Dutch dialect is the closest.
I didn't know that the Faroes had their own language. I'd always assumed it was Danish. You learn something every day. 👍
@@Lemonz1989 Ahh the Faroes, a tiny team that Scotland can't beat at football. Byrta is a nice singer though.
One thing you didn't mention is how easily English adapts to new circumstances. Since it's a mixed language, it can incorporate words from other languages very quickly. I studied Spanish and German and while the latter has a similar adaptability, both languages are not built to keep up quickly. German is especially hard to get it right with four cases. If you think English has no rules, wait 'til you get a load of French. Symbol-based languages like Mandarin are never going to survive in much the same way that Roman numerals did not survive contact with Arabic numerals. Learning 20-30 letters and constructing words from them is far easier than learning thousands of symbols not to mention how a symbolic language would work in, say, computer code.
In history, there were a lot of non-European empires that came and went. It was just coincidence that when it was Europe's turn to colonize, advanced weapons were also created to keep them in power. By the same token, lots of languages have prevailed over the centuries but English took its place at the same time as global communication exploded. Don't look for English to be replaced any time soon.
Also many other languages even Malay in SE Asia is using same alphabet as english.
I think English will continue for at least a century, nothing else is as versatile and widespread
I did not have much trouble with French when I was in high school. There are exceptions to rules here and there but nowhere as many as in English.
@@supercolinblow While I never took French, I do remember reading that in like the 1500s, they redesigned the language to make it sound more beautiful. That had to introduce a lot of weirdness in spellings and lots of exceptions, no?
@@TXKafir mais oui :)
English is my love, food and Shelter.
I think media and the internet mean English will stay on top. It's the reason my daughter's Argentinien husband speaks English and she struggles with Spanish.
Next lingua franca: Spanish??? I think a lot more could be said on this. Maybe a video ranking top 5 contenders for next lingua franca, with pros & cons of each.
Nice idea!
Francophone Africa certainly has an advantage in birthrates but as another commenter stated, young Africans will continue to seek opportunities and adapt to English speaking environments unless something drastic is done in their home countries. Just like "Friends" has been the quintessential show for English learners since it aired in the '90s, Spanish language music and pop culture is growing rapidly in popularity. The range of similar vocabulary between Spanish and English and the common popular and social culture between North America and Latin America will certainly help this development as well.
I wonder if there is a writing system that could supplant the Latin alphabet.
Spanish can't be lingua franca because of its limited geographical area. Spanish speakers are mostly in Latin America whereas English and French speakers are on every continent.
@@Syl75 Spanish is confined in the americas, but entering more and more in the U.S. that could led to some interesting language development. Dunno, maybe becoming in some distant future the ruling language in that country, or creating a new language type of Spanglish?
fun fact: the EU originally had French as its lingua franca, but one of the unintended consequences of the UK joining in the 70s ensured that French was displaced by English. Romanians in Brussels will tell you that they speak English with a Bostonian accent because they learned English by watching 'Friends'.
It's a bit more complicated. The EU officially refuses to have a single lingua franca in order not to privilege any member country. That's why it has 28 official languages. The official language of each member is also an official language of the EU.
As this is obviously impractical, there are also 4 "working languages". Both French and English are among them. Another one is German, which was never actually widely used despite its official status.
Nice thing about speaking a “smaller” language, like Dutch for instance is that when you’re abroad, nobody has a clue about what you’re talking about with your spouse or family unless you want them to and switch to English.
In the Falklands conflict the Welsh regiments spoke in Welsh on the radio to make life difficult for the Argentinians should they intercept the transmissions.
@@Titan604 Brilliant!!!
Tegenwoordig moet je daar wel mee uitkijken hoor, als je eens een keertje op vakantie bent in Azië en denkt een Aziaat tegen te komen moet je niet over me gaan roddellen want ik versta het gewoon XP
Yes but Germanic language speakers of German, Danish, and maybe even English may understand enough of Dutch to get context.
@@Molr026 ja dat is me in Oslo al eens gebeurd. Dat risico loop je altijd. Ha ha
I like that you deviated from your usual topics this time around. I think it would bring a lot of added value to your channel if you keep bringing this kind of videos. :)
as a non native speaking european, it's damn nice to be able to speak with people from other european countries with relative ease, in a language that I'd say isn't ugly, and easy to learn. and wouldn't want to see it change to something else.
It's not really surprising when you look at the history though, The British had by far the largest empire in human history which gave them tremendous influence over regions located on the other side of the world. Remember the sun never set on the British empire, thats how massive and powerful britain was at its peak.
On the other hand The US, a nation indirectly created by the British. The US was the sleeping giant of WW2 and after the war was over the US alongwith USSR became the superpowers in the world and the European era was over. The USSR also had a lot of influence on its neighbours but the US gained influence all over the world through programs like marshall plan and investing in Japan. This helped the US to gain stable and reliable alliance.
American culture through its games and Hollywood and tech industry reached all parts of the world including the USSR, American movies and tv shows and games like San Andreas(parody of American culture) was enjoyed by people all over the world.
So the US and UK were probably the most powerful and influential countries in the world for the past 2 centuries and guess what globalisation was also at an all time high and still is and guess what language these countries spoke: ENGLISH!!!
The Sun still has yet to set on the British Empire. It is admittedly a close thing but there is still enough territories that some part is always in sunlight.
it is just a period of time, the Romans were a superpower for more than 1000 years and yet they became history, nothing remains the same
They weren't an Empire but rather a leech.
7:15 I disagree with that sentiment as well. To become a true global language a language has to check a few boxes in my opinion (in no particular order):
1. Is it easy for foreigners to speak/understand?
2. Is it easy for foreigners to learn?
3. Is it easy to write in?
Chinese fails at basically every single one of those while English doesn't.
Let's do the checks for English:
1. Is it easy for foreigners to speak/understand? Most words/sounds in English are quite distinct in my opinion. There are few words that completely change their meaning just because of a mispronunciation.
2. Is it easy for foreigners to learn? Simply yes. It has one article, the alphabet has only 26 letters and the list of irregular verbs fits onto about four DIN A4 pages.
3. Is it easy to write in it? Also yes. You only have to learn/have ways to use 26 letters and a little punctuation and you're good to go. Chinese in comparison has 3500 basic characters but Chinese schoolchildren graduate often knowing 5k-6k but all together there are over 50k. Easy is different. This is the main reason I firmly believe that no "hieroglyphic" language (for the lack of a better word since English isn't my native language either) will ever become a world language in the way English is today.
The way you talk about language with such passion and detail make your videos really interesting. Even if your not planning on learning a foreign language
I dont think that French will overtake English. English is the perfect (european) language to use for a global language because its basically a mixture of many different languages mostly a mixture of the romansh and germanic language family. French is also not as easy to learn because you mentioned that English is a hard langauge but French is definetly as hard as english if not harder because of the various pronounce options etc. In my opinion the humanity will create the perfect productive language wich gives the highest amount of information in the shortest sentences with no relations to any current language.
The other side of “difficulty “ is precision. French will grow for sure but American English will still dominate of those who want to get things done.
It depends on if these African countries ever develop into richer countries right now they are the poorest in the world but they are getting better but its the same with Spanish most Spanish speaking countries got too many problems and nobody wants to be like them most English speaking countries have higher living standards another problem for French in Africa is that maybe in the future the Africans will prefer their local African languages and not French its not like in the Americas where the native languages are almost completely gone.
Most countries teach UK in school, but since all the media is American, they learn US in practice.
@@Mortablunt Not here in Oz or NZ we don't and yet we have lots of US media.
@@footscorn You're not an ESL country.
@@belstar1128 The thing is if those french countries want to communicate with anyone other than france they will have to learn english. They will remain poor as long as they speak french. Theres a reason why nigeria and south africa are the richest sub saharan countries by far. French has a much higher chance of decreasing in numbers of speakers of practical french than increasing them. As is the cas in places like quebec.
I once asked a polish friend of mine I'd English is hard to learn. He said yes because you have words that sound like they start with a letter, but then you find out it actually actually startes with a completely different letter. I said like cake.
It sounds as if it starts with a k.
Then knees sound as if it starts with a n.
So English can be hard.
English is not my first language but I kind of like it.😃
Would love to see you create a video like this on Welsh, specifically how the language has come back from near extinction to becoming the "go to" model for language revival.
I think Catalan or Basque would be a better example. The number of native Welsh speakers is decreasing afaik. Children learn it at school but most don't speak it at home, and most speak English to their friends. The fact that more and more people learn it doesn't mean these will be fluent speakers and transmit it to their children... unfortunately.
Hebrew has to be the top example of language revival. It's has gone from having no native speakers 150 years ago to nearly 10 million native speakers today.
@@adamclark1972uk The revival of Hebrew was done in so particular conditions that it can't be done again for any other language.
In a few words:
- people from many different countries and who spoke different languages
- go to another country to create a new society
- most could already read Hebrew
- Hebrew is a prestigious language.
Nothing to do with the Welsh situation...
@@adamclark1972uk Herbrew isn't a revival as much as a resurrection
@@gerald4013 .
Welsh speaking doesn't seemed to have diminished where I live, I often hear kids speaking Welsh and if you phone any public service, the phone will be answered in Welsh.
You skipped the fact that nowdays we are more globalized than ever before, that changes how languages develop, spread and maintain their usage alot.
English has the advantage that it is a very simple language. We often say English is not something you learn it’s something you catch … like a flu. Send you kid to day care, register them in sports, send them to play in the park .., a few weeks later they come home and speak English. Perhaps that simply confirms how widespread the language is. But grammatically it is simpler than most Latin languages that I know and it certainly seems easier than the Asian languages with their many many symbols.
@@thedamntrain what is hard for you may not be hard for someone else. Some people find English hard whereas others don't see a problem learning it. As a native Portuguese speaker, Spanish is a hellish language for me to even try to learn, whereas English just carved its way into my brain really easy. It should be the other way around, but somehow i do find Spanish harder than English, even though it is the sister language of my own native tongue and shares a lot more similarities in between. The thing is, everything depends on which is it your native language and on yourself.
@@thedamntrain i don't think of English in linguistical aspects, but i do agree with you that some things are senseless in English and they could have constructed the language a little bit better in some ways. Haha
@@RangelGabriel My wife speaks Spanish and Italian. Portuguese and Catalan make her head hurt. Same story from the other side of the fence, I guess.
Exactly
Our local variety of French in louisiana was nearly completely stamped out by Anglo Americans and it's been making a revival, primarily among the youth. So you may be on to something lol
Hey, thanks a lot for the video! I'm from one of these African countries where French is a thing (I am from Mauritania). But here's the thing: even though French is required by the education system and is one of the official languages of the country, English still wins because the influence of the internet on young people is much greater than that of the government and schools.
Short answer: because America rules economically. That implies science and tencological invovation. Cultural exportation is also a important part thanks to its huge internal monolingual maket, easy to produce and sell in and out.
Oh please, US is a British colony
short answer: industrial revolution starts in uk.
@@arolemaprarath6615 do you think people fell in love with english because of harry potter or because of American movies, the UN literally uses miles to measure distance countries are allowed to claim in the ocean
@@franknwogu4911 Yes and Imperial System came from Britain. US = British colony
@@arolemaprarath6615 but the uk separated their version of the imperial system
Even Caesar actually spoke in Greek when he said, "The die is cast." Greek was still the language of the upper class and educated during the rule of Rome.
USA has 300 million first language of English speakers, UK 60 million, Canada about 30 million, Australia 25 million, South Africa about 20 million, and NZ 5 million. That's over 400 million (your first language or mother tongue is the language you dream and swear in)
India, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, New Zealand, Babgaldesh
Ireland 8m
@@Alphae21 Jamaica, Singapore, Philippines, Ghana, Liberia, Namibia, Zambia, Rhodesia
I think the global language has to be easy to understand and learn for most people, thats why i think english and spanish are/were doing very well globaly.
French and mandarin on the other hand are quite difficult for most people to learn (espacially mandarin) so i dont see those 2 replacing english anytime soon
English sound have a large deviation from its writing system. Plus the grammar is so complicated, because it belongs to fusional language.
On the other hand, Mandarin have the most easiest grammar, because Altaic people invaded and moved into china many times. Thus, grammar was simplified, and most of the grammatical rules have no exception.
And Spanish has very systematical writing style and sound.
Overall, in my opinion, Chinese, Indonesian,or Spanish is suitable for global language
@@Takuaku867 if it's so suitable why are they not global languages then? I agree with spanish being the second most likely to take off after english. But I dont see the other langauges ever being international.
@@philgamer5280 That’s because the influence of British Empire and America. They invaded many countries, and also they were economic superpower. Thus, people had to learn English.
However, recently, China got to be a economic super power. Then many people started to learn it. In east Asia, such as Japan, Korea and Vietnam, if they can speak Chinese, they can enter a good company.
I expect that Spanish would be the dominant language in north and south America. however in Asia, Chinese would be the most dominant language in the future.
and by some chance, Chinese would be global language, because of its economic power.
@@philgamer5280 It is unlikely Mandarin will be dominant. In Asia there is Malay which uses the same alphabet as English and is spoken in Malaysia and Indonesia. The alphabet that is used by english is also used by many other languages all across the globe. Mandarin alphabet is most isolated to China, The country of Taiwan and a little in Japan, vietnam.
Mandarin is only spoken in China and the country of Taiwan it is geographically "isolated" even though alot of people speak it. Even in Singapore with mostly chinese population most of the young generation don't speak mandarin and prefer to communicate in English. Most chinese also add English name to their ID as well. Mandarin require larger font to be readable which makes it take up alot of space ie not efficient visually you can see this problem in road signs. When trying to learn Mandarin you will encounter teacher from china who are spreading CCP/CPC propaganda which is a turn off to learn this language.
Exactly
I always assumed that English has been popular around the world due to the dominance of the British Empire before the World Wars and the power and influence of the United States after the World Wars. Another thing that has surprised me as a British Canadian having moved to the States is how different American English is when it comes to spelling and writing. I had to go through the odd experience of taking out U's from words where they should be and reversing re's into er's and crap when it comes to grey vs gray I still don't know which one is the correct American spelling
I don't know about the US, but in Canada, if you use US or British spellings it doesn't really matter, both are readily understood.
We’ll still understand, if you write centre, theatre, or favourite. 😊 and we use BOTH gray’s, greyhound and gray suit.
@@brawnbenson552there are other things, whereby we can easily get past them but can cause momentary confusion. For example, in my northern England English if I need to answer a call of nature, I would ask where the toilet is. Stateside it would be more correct to ask where the restroom is. I only actually realised this when working (in England) somewhere with a lot of tourists where English wasn’t their first language. Restroom or washroom was commonly asked, and while I knew what they were referring to without issue due to the influence of American culture, it is not a word I ever use myself and would raise eyebrows if I did towards other people of my kinfolk.
Other examples of this are trash/trashcan- not a term I’ve ever used but would understand if someone said to me. Faucet is a word I probably wouldn’t understand at first, here we call it a tap and I don’t think I’ve seen much American media where it’s mentioned.
@@wr2899 tap water is commonly known at least where I live in America as water from the faucet. On the other hand abbreviations can differ, as I had not encountered the abbreviation W.C. as being a toilet (water closet) until I went to Israel back in 1977. (Israel having been under British rule from the end of WW1 to 1948 meant that most signs that are trilingual (English, Hebrew & Arabic) are in British English.
Another aspect of English is that it's structure allows it to absorb words from other languages very easily.
First, I'm Polish, and Polish is my native language.
Second, I've studied Rusian and German in shool, as well as English, and I must tell you, that I consider English easiest of those four. I've never studyed French, but I think, that easy to study English is HUGE factor in Lingula Franca terms.
by the way it’s studied, easiest, french and study. anyways nice work learning four languages
Very interesting that a Polish speaker would consider English easier to learn than Russian. Could you explain why?
I'm studying french and I can guarantee you that the rules for french pronunciation are more complicated than English rules and I'm italian native.
@@Stazzo82 Would you explain how? Genuine question. I found that you can teach all there is to French pronunciation rules in just one class while I studied the same in English for a semester at uni. It might be easier for you to pronounce EN than FR but the rules are so much fewer and straightforward in French in my experience. In all other respects though, English is relatively easy to learn at a level fit for communication and I'm sure that plays a role in its popularity.
You mean English grammar ? I can see it is not easy in your sentences.
I would say an example in india 🤝🏼 that English never fade out because in India there is more than 26 official languages because every state has their own language so as a nation we can't learn all the languages rather we can learn a common language that is English because its easy to learn in india every state has English as a official 2nd language and everyone knows that India is a republic country 🇮🇳✨ it was ruled by a British for long time so here in india lot of English culture and language is spread and also indian modern economy is running through Information technology and well known by everyone in india there are lots of offshore business are getting from US and UK Australia and english speaking countries so final conclusion is :
As a big population nation 🇮🇳 we are speaking English so we equal to china so definitely English language will not be fadeout at any stage but one thing we indians all are speak respect our mother tongue and we always speak our language as a first and any language could be a second one.
Thanks for reading by statement ❤️😄🇮🇳
One additional fact is that English is the international language of the sea. Seafarers in most cases if English is not their first language have pass a MARLINS fluency test. Every Port for Comms speaks English, Marine Emergency services too. Pilots for port entry etc. By default all ships agents or anyone else involved with ships services needs to be fluent. It's far more reaching than you think. I am a Ships Master and have been at sea for 42 years and everywhere I have been English is the common tongue.
I like and appreciate the thought you put into your videos. I think that English will remain the top language though... especially in our lifetime... through technology and innovation, movies and music, and business.
1. You can learn this language even if you have less than 80 IQ.
2. Colonial history of the British Empire
What’s the benchmark for other languages ? Is it higher or lower?
English is considered a hard language isn't it
I'm a native English speaker and I took three years of Spanish in high school, I had to take 40 hours of German when I was in the Army, and I've been working on Welsh and Polish on Duolingo.
Great video. English may not be the easiest language to learn, but French is by no means an improvement. I'm also doubtful that the proliferation of new ideas and compelling media from French speaking sources is going to increase dramatically in the foreseeable future (50 years?) as compared to English; although I'd be pleasantly surprised if it did. Economic opportunity is a big driver of language adoption and in the near-ish term, Africa is certainly poised to offer a lot of that... as an aside I always hoped that a grammatically, phonetically and orthographically simple language, like Korean (I'm not Korean btw), would become a global lingua franca but I don't see that happening anytime in the future.
I think one other thing to mention that might not be so important. Perhaps we could ask, is the current English language gonna be the lingua franca forever? There are already many different dialects and variations of the English language spoken other countries. I wonder if someday, English will be so influential that it would not only be common for foreigners to learn, like in China, but that those same people might create their own variation of English and if the country of these people were to gain a lot of influence and power, like China, maybe their version might become more popular? I don't know, just a quick thought
Very good thought! There's a vowel shift already beginning in a certain part of America... and these linguistic sound shifts take generations to fully develop, so if there's a 'one world English' some day, we're unlikely to be around to witness it. Perhaps our great-grandkids will speak differently to us? I have no doubt that if China rules the world some day, it will be in English -- their own version of it!
Clap, clap, clap... Spot on in both languages and their corresponding explanations.
Just a few days ago, I was wondering which would be harder to learn French or German. I read that French starts out easy but becomes progressively harder over time while German starts out hard but gets easier over time instead.
I find French much easier to learn and speak
@@keidanekeith668 French is easy to read because you can use context clues to figure out what is being said. But spoken French, instead of a feeling like a challenge, it feels like suicide lol
French does not get harder (I’m preparing for a C2 certification exam, so I know the process). It actually gets easier as lots of advanced words in english are borrowed from french
@@erenparla3869 I heard the opposite but I guess the only way to really know is find out for myself and develop my own opinion.
French is easier, it doesn’t get harder
English is the best language to use for contracts and science. Working internationally, contracts in other languages are more difficult to ensure common understanding and ambiguity increases leading to more disputes and breeches in contract. Until another language offers such control and precision, English will remain dominant. Also, international call centers and working in computers, English language constructs and use are at the core. Replacing English will take a long time.
I loved many things about this video, except one thing; you completely ignored Spanish almost entirely, Spanish is a much more easy language to learn than French, French has a complicated pronunciation and letters that are just there and don't sound or sound different than they should sound which makes it complicated while Spanish has a plain set of rules and the pronunciation of the letters never change. Spanish has a major population of native speakers and L2 speakers are on the rise, Spanish speaking countries are increasingly getting more developed and thus the content in Spanish is massive; movies, books, YT videos, Wikipedia articles, music, news and tons of more media. Yeah there's a lot of L2 speakers in Africa and they can make a lingua franca of sorts in a region of Africa, but that's not enough, most of them use and promote their own native languages and make their content in those languages. Spanish is also the second most spoken language in USA and China has been promoting the language extensively. Once some Hispanic countries make it big economically you'll see how the language will have another major renovation for the widespread of its use which is already happening with the growing popularity of Spanish language music and shows, Spain is also the fourth-largest economy in the European Union and after Brexit its power is increasing and you see a lot of their media including the internationally acclaimed show La Casa de Papel known in English as Money Heist. I believe that you have a personal bias towards French because of this, you only showed one somewhat meaningless example to support your whole argument. English will continue to be the global language of the world for quite some time as it's easier to stick with something well established than change it, and with massive countries with L2 speakers like developing India, a lot of Africa's influencing countries, most of Europe, Latin America, Asia and basically most of the internet users globally, also powerful native speakers countries like Australia and Canada and the developing South Africa (which is an African powerhouse), I see it sticking to the first position for the foreseeable future and Spanish in second place, I believe Chinese could enter at the third place but it's extremely complicated and undesirable to learn for most people because of that and the fact that most Chinese conduct their international trade in English. In conclusion, French won't be a global lingua franca anytime soon.
Fully agree. I try to but i don't see an end to English being the most spoken language, let alone being replaced by French or "Chinese" (quote unquote because of different dialects).
@@thedamntrain well we are not in the 19th century. It was a whole different world back then comparing to what it is now. I believe the language that dominates the media and mainstream (in all ways) will always be more attractive than others from this technological era onwards, and at least for now i don't see it being replaced by any other language soon (like growing Korean and others). For me, only Spanish has a minimal chance. Anyway this is just my opinion and i'm no one to decide whether it will continue to or not be the most spoken language in the future. Who knows what future holds in store?
@@RangelGabriel Spanish speakers around the World are also the most likely to improve their English skills. I mean like in the US where a lot of Hispanics are progressively assimilating the English language and spreading it back around.
The international business language in Spain is English...
In terms of "popular music softpower" the Spanish language is quite important but so much less in terms of technologies, world-wide brands and products, etc.
@@jandron94 i agree with you. If English were to be replaced by any other language, so technology and society as a whole would need to be different. Whether we want it or not, English "rules" technology, and technology owns the world.
As a french I agree. I see no langage replacing english anytime soon. Chinese and French because too complicated, spanish would be an easier choice but unless some new incredible tech is developped in spanish to drive people to learn it I don’t see how it could work
English is definitely the easiest language to learn, at least to have a sufficient level for casual conversations. I speak 5 langages and English was by far the easiest. The hardest one is definitely mandarin, i don’t see how it can spread like english did even if they open up and spread their culture.
French (as a native speaker) is also very complicated, both in the grammar, spelling and pronunciation. So unless their is a specific driver to learn it I don’t see it become again lingua franca.
English is much more complex than you think, but you are right, casual English is not too tough.
You can't have a closed society and have your language spread. Its just a simple fact, people keep talking about China becoming a world power and Mandarin overtaking English but their citizens can't even engage with foreigners freely online.
@@Blaze6432 agreed.
I agree! English still has quite a long run in my opinion. I don’t see it change in the next 50 to 100 years at least.
@@Blaze6432 mandarin overtaking english? What a joke😂
I’m Scottish I can speak a little French which was mandatory in Primary school in primary 7 & also in 1st & 2 nd year of high school too. Being our closest neighbours kinda makes sense . I’d love to visit Germany 🇩🇪 one day so have decided to try & learn the basics which I think shows some respect going to another country & speaking their language albeit I won’t be fluent but at least I’ll give it a good go. French is beautiful to listen too also. I can count to ten in Chinese & that’s about it.
Easy to learn for me as a Chinese. SOV structure just like Chinese. I don't know how easy English is until I tried to learn Spanish. OMG, verb conjugation, mood.... confused about what is actually the subject. Me gustas tu, (who like who??)
Seems to me like English's dominance is only increasing.
Nice to see a fellow Tasmanian in the comments
Thanks to native english speakers' laziness. If not because of english speakers' laziness, english would never dominate as the most used language in the world at all, until now.
@@adrianwakeisland4710 On the contrary, it spread specifically due to our industriousness. Not only in going out and conquering vast areas, but then unlike the other imperialists, actually building them up into prosperous nations which could then work on spreading English further through different mediums. Film, music, the internet, and more.
@@anon8740 you focus only in the anglophobe side, that's why you think english is dominant. Yes, english is commonly used on most aspects you mean like films and internet, but most of them are in Anglic countries. The films, industry and internet in the americas outside anglic areas is Spanish, not English. English is strong only in Anglic north america, pacific regions and africa.
@@anon8740 You didn't know internet is now a multilingual media, not exclusively english. English language suits only in the anglophone country. The fact that majority of the World's population cannot understand and speak english at all is the real sign that English is just THE REGIONAL LINGUA FRANCA, neither a GLOBAL LANGUAGE nor a GLOBAL LINGUA FRANCA. English is just like the rest of international languages of the World, it's just a REGIONAL INTERNATIONAL LANGUAGE forever, even it has the most number of users of that language in the World.
Wow! A very good video. And very informative!
My two-bob's worth:
English is a naturally syncretic language. It has absorbed ancient Greek, Latin (and chunks of later "Latinate" languages), Norse, early German, Hindi, etc.) It also "jargonizes"lots of the new things, unlike, say German, which tends to use long, compound nouns. Take the example of the English word, "dog". It can be a noun or a verb, in many different contexts. English is, in many cases, very "context-driven", mainly because of this widespread use of common words to maintain "compactness".
It has long shed a lot of inherited grammatical complexity. Some folk complain about the spelling, but part of that is because of the diverse origins of the language and the other major factor is that that, in its "native" land, it was coalescing ans a language at the same time the written word was being broadly disseminated in PRINT, not in illuminated, hand-crafted tomes. Typesetters and editors basically carved the written language into wooden blocks and ultimately into moveable type and lithograph plates and stones.
Not only is English the language of "air-traffic control", but of aviation in general.
It is also the key language of mining and petroleum exploration. Conversations on international oil rigs can sound like Shakespeare meets science-fiction gibberish, because it is loaded with technical jargon, but the core is stripped down Thus, the Spanish drill-pusher, the Russian geologist, the Nigerian plant operator and the Mongolian "roughneck" can pass and receive vital information, albeit to the bewilderment of monolingual onlookers.
Music is essentially locked into Italian. Soil science is basically Russian. Ballet runs on French. (My local serious ballet company has dancers from all sorts of places. The 'Boss" is a Native mandarin speaker, and there is nothing wrong with his French or English).
Some years ago, I was working on a project in Viet Nam. Many of the locals, especially in and around Hanoi, spoke several languages; Cantonese, Russian, French and often several of the fifty-plus "minority / 'hill-tribe" languages.
One interpreter was fluent in Tieng Viet, French, Russian and English, with some German thrown in. She was in high demand because not only was she technically fluent, she could reel off jokes in all her languages and "get" the ones told back to her. She was also a certified mechanical engineer!
Many of the older "cyclo" drivers in town had multiple languages and, as the business with the US and Australia built up, they were all merrily learning English by 1990. One of them also spoke fluent Japanese, learned from a couple of Japanese military engineers who "stayed behind" in his village after WW2. One other thing about language in Viet Nam is that unlike the "purist" approach of the French or the North Koreans, the government decided that, if the language was going to absorb a steady stream of new words (mostly from English), it would do so in an orderly fashion. Thus, they set up an academic panel to "standardize" the spelling (including tonal diacriticals), and pronunciation.
I think that the new generation are interested in learning Korean and Japanese. Korean is a little bit easier because hasn't 3 ways to say the same thing 😸.
On the other hand USA and alla America is becoming more and more Spanish.
yet they still learn english first, american culture is more dominant than japan's and korea's
As s young boy grewing up in the 60s,my first english teacher was mel blanc.
Yes, English has become the language of international business. But in many regions like Latinamerica and mainland China if you do not speak the local language you are lost.
Facts, that is why I studied portuguese also i plan to visita brazil
Not really, When I visited China, Japan and Korea if i tried to speak the local language (not fluent) to them they prefer to speak English to me. They are more interested to practice english with me.
If you speak to the educated and upper class of these countries you will be fine
I have to disagree with the conclusion on the French language. I'm from West Africa though my country of origin is Anglophone (Ghana). There is a growing dissent and tension between France and its former colonies in West Africa( where most French in Africa is spoken). This, coupled with the rising Anglicization of the world and even in modern french itself as well as the presence of Arabic in these countries and the very waning allegiance to France, makes it easy for another language to take its place. For example, in Rwanda (east Africa), after the 1994 genocide and the very terrible response from Belgium (former colonial power) and France, and who some claim fueled the civil war and genocide for their own personal gain, Rwanda switched to teaching English in schools instead of French and now, although French is spoken by some people, English is gaining dominance as the official language.
I think French has a hold now in West Africa but Rwanda has shown how easy it is to change an official language, especially when it is not the native language of a lot of people in these countries. After all, these romance languages are only official languages in these countries because they act as a lingua franca for the different ethnic groups with sometimes very different and mutually intelligible languages. Thus, it is so easy to switch to another.
Kagame is ruling back to the Francophone world, as his regime is more and more under scrutiny by the UK and the US. That's why the Secretary General of the Francophone organization is now headed by a trusted Kagame minister (Louise Mushikiwabo), and French language is back on the menu.
Africa also contributes a lot to today's Francophone culture, not only in Francophone Africa, but also in France. Words from nouchi (an argot of Ivory Coast) are more and more into the argot of everyday French people, and even reach Quebec (a lot of my friends in Quebec are from Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Cameroon, Senegal, Tunisia, Algeria), like Arabic words are already mixed.
Music is the main entry gate for Africans to enter global French culture, but also today's most proficient Francophone authors are now in Africa (Goncourt award of 2021 to Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, after Marie NDiaye in 2009).
Or as the Algerian author Kamel Daoud says it so well: French language is a spoil of war.
Why not have tension about your own Ghanaian languages? France and Britain must be laughing at your fights over their languages.
I like to think of this as a friendly discussion not a fight. It's interesting to see other views on this topic so I'd have this.
I think we can have an objective discussion without anthropomorphizing these countries or bringing whatever reaction they may give.
It's just honestly a discussion
@@vennisabarfi958 Why are Africans fussing over European languages. They were all forced upon Africans, sadly. The discussion would be around "how SLAVERY spread English and French"
@28gire I do not deny the joy multilingual speakers have, check I'm multilingual. My point is what's the real reason behind the spread of English or French (let's start with Africa)?
It's plainly SLAVERY committed by the British empire (and they've tried to apologize to Kenya for example)
The French former colonies were also demanded to speak French and actually still have their money printed in France, The Franc.
So I'm just against the TH-cam saying the British liked to move and conquer stuff, as if it's a sport. Lives were lost, the least you can say is to admit it was because of SLAVERY.
While spelling can be problematical, English has the best combination of complex words/ideas with the simplest rules of grammar, especially when it comes to verbs and tenses.
Perhaps i am biased, but working as web developer, i find quite unrealistic that we turn to french, nothing is coded in french. It is true that Africa is a continent of of children, and in next future this will spread french speakers around the globe (and also poverty). Number of people is something, but we must consider also who is ruling the world, where is technology and business... so, I must admit, USA and EU will keep english as lingua franca. It is the new generations of Africans that will learn english to get a job, and live as immigrants elsewhere.
well said
The biggest reason I don't see French eclipsing English anytime soon is because the growth of French is almost entirely in African states that aren't showing signs of being powerhouse economies or cultural influences any time soon. It requires a lot of speakers but also a lot of influence and power to create a lingua franca.
France and part of Canada can take this place, and some African country will end up being powerful enough but probably not in the next 10 to 20 years
@@zzaronn Canada is primarily English speaking and the vast majority of its cultural exports are English in tongue and that will continue to be the case. France is already a cultural powerhouse but it just can't compete with the anglosphere alone. While francophone African nations may grow in time to be major powers that is far too far in the future to make any useful predictions about French becoming a lingua franca again. We can't forget that English has almost double the speakers in Africa when compared to French at the moment and predicting population growth of the languages so far into the future isn't so easy. If francophone Africa becomes wealthy its population growth will slow. If it doesn't it won't have the influence to produce a lingua franca.
@@404Dannyboy Belgium and Switzerland speak french too.
These african country choose French and keep learning it even if they could drop it for a more useful english.
But French is used in multiple powerful country, is learned as secondary language in many other country, and is largely used in a growing continent. It still is possible for it to become a lingua franca
@@zzaronn Honestly, more Swiss people spoke fluent English than French when last I visited lol That is ignoring that Switzerland and Belgium kind of dkn't matter on the scale we are talking. All that said, I am not arguing that French can't become a lingua franca again, of course it can. It even has one of the better chances of doing so. What I am saying is that it isn't very likely to become a lingua franca at current pace especially when compared to how strong English is remaining and the future prospects of other languages like Mandarin or Spanish. I would put French's odds much closer to something like Indonesian, Arabic, or Hindi.
@@404Dannyboy lmao ok you don't know anything. Like if arabic had a chance, no one will learn a new alphabet