Something to add here—I do agree that English isn’t going to just “disappear,” but it’s not going to be the only game in town anymore, since it isn’t now to begin with.  In 20 years or so, Mandarin Chinese is going to be unbelievably important. As will Spanish. So will German—the German-led EU may well soon become the economic beacon of the world, and with that status, so does German’s prestige increase. Already, an increasing fraction of critical technical papers in everything from engineering to computer science is being authored in German, just like in the 1800’s. My friend works in an engineering company and they basically won’t hire anyone anymore unless they have some German ability, or at least a willingness to learn it. And Arabic? Since Arabic is the language of the oil-exporting countries, who in our current commodities-driven age are really becoming if anything the world’s most important economic arbiters, Arabic is darn important too.

I’d say these 5 languages—Mandarin Chinese, German, English, Spanish and Arabic—will all probably be important global languages in the next 20 years.

In addition, a few other big languages—French, Japanese, Portuguese and of course Hindi/Urdu—will be extremely important regional tongues. It’s a multilingual future, and any notion of global English as something special above these other languages is just flat-out ridiculous.

As an aside, many people have pointed out how much non-native English variants differ not only from native speakers’ English but also from each other—which effectively solves nothing as far as international communication. One could argue, then, that some “international standard English” would have to be adopted but then, we’re right back at the same problem we started with—this international simplified standard would be sneered at by native English-speakers, and there still be massive problems of mutual intelligibility between native speakers and non-native speakers, plus the additional burden of potentially needing to know both for non-natives. And non-natives are again tremendously disadvantaged in their productivity to the benefit of native-speakers. It just doesn’t work.

IMHO, if we’re going to have some international standard “second language” at all, it would have to be some kind of invented language, some Esperanto Plus with greater attention to e.g. Asian languages or something—that would ensure not to burden any particular native-speaker group too much more at the expense of others, and it would also prevent some kind of privileged “native speaker class” from rising up to claim it as its own, thus again advantaging itself while disadvantaging the other groups.

Obviously this method has its own problems, it’s just that I can’t really see anything else on the horizon, especially since even today, “global English” is at best gradually declining with the loss of unipolar status to the USA, and (more accurately) has never reached anything like a global standard status at all. I mean, just over the past 2 months, I was in Korea, South America, China and eastern Europe on business. Even in 3- or 4-star hotels and conference rooms, let alone in transportation hubs, the front desk and managerial staff don’t know English, in most cases not even a rudimentary level—you need to carry a phrasebook around or otherwise try to get some of the local lingo. They’d blanch white if I tried to start an English conversation!

So until we start getting Star Trek devices to insta-communicate, maybe we need an Esperanto Plus or something else creative. I don’t know, maybe if Britain hadn’t gotten so bloodied in the world wars or stayed out, maybe put down the post-WWII rebellions, something to hold onto its empire longer and not crumble after the wars, then we might indeed have a globe peppered with first-language English-speakers all over the place. But the UK empire fell apart before that, and in the world we live in, global English is just not going to happen, by any means.

Alex, a lot of good points there and I agree with most of what you say.  Just this part: [In next 100 years] “English will not be overtaken as the world’s L2 by any other language. ” 

That I doubt, in fact I think that Mandarin Chinese is not very far away from doing just that, probably in no more than 15-20 years. 

I know a lot of people say that Mandarin is “just too tough for non-natives to learn due to the writing system,” but that problem has already been solved—when non-natives use Mandarin with each other, they often use a simplified version (the same as they do with e.g. French, English, German or whatever) that just represents written Chinese in the Roman alphabet, that is the pinyin writing system.  You’d be surprised how surprisingly well communication seems to go with this.  I speak very little Mandarin myself, but Chinese is apparently a very well-structured and regular language that’s very good for business, and it’s apparently easy to use simple software to switch between the characters and the pinyin writing system, since the Chinese characters (in Chinese though obviously not in Japanese) have very close associations to particular sounds.

Whether or not the tonal marks are used for the Mandarin in Roman characters, it’s apparently easily intelligible for all sides (with any ambiguity taken care of by context).  A friend of mine was in a meeting recently between a group of Malaysians, Koreans and some SE Asians conferencing on the local business environment, and their Powerpoint slides made just such a use of the Roman-character Chinese and of course a simplified spoken Chinese.  And I guess maybe because of the regular structure of Chinese, it might have been easier for the group to understand than English—it went great for all sides involved.  I’m guessing there might have been some fumbles with the tones here and there, but context and clear articulation with each talk made it easy for everyone to understand.

This process is still in its infancy, but a lot of non-natives are already switching over, and the various means of representation gives Chinese a lot of flexibility.  When China becomes the world’s biggest economy, as it will soon, then there’s really not much to stop this form of Mandarin from displacing English as a global lingua franca, extending even outside of Asia.  A few years ago this prospect sounded scary to me, but it seems to work well for people and even many Westerners have been participating in these Chinese-as-lingua-franca meetings.

As you say though, just as with something like French, English or German today, it will ultimately be the Chinese native-speakers who most fundamentally impact the “standard form” of such a business Mandarin, with various simplifications then evolving as needed.

“The Chinese economy would need to be not only bigger and more influential than the American, but bigger and more influential than all English speaking countries combined. More influential would probably need one of two conditions- more of the world’s big brands being Chinese than American or the per capita income of China being higher than America.”

Remember, it’s not just China alone that is Chinese-speaking (Chinese as a first language, that is)—there’s also Taiwan, Singapore and very large segments of the educated classes of Malaysia, Vietnam and other nearby countries that more or less use China as a business language.  (BTW, at my meeting the speakers were Malay-speaking, not ethnic Chinese Malaysians as I’ll point out below.) Thus even w/o formal “colonization” Chinese has already spread thoroughly throughout the region into active use.  This may be one reason why at that meeting, people opted for Chinese rather than English. 

IMHO, Singapore is the most interesting barometer b/c alone with Hong Kong, it has a very large Chinese population that at one point, had English as an official tongue.  HK has now become utterly dominated by Chinese, and not just Cantonese but Mandarin—my last trip in HK, it was very difficult to find English-speakers out in the streets anymore.  (I speak no Cantonese whatsoever and only a tiny bit of Mandarin.)  And in Singapore, even many in the non-Chinese population are rushing to learn Mandarin rather than English.  IOW, Singapore is now going Chinese (linguistically at least) frequently at the expense of English—already.

On the flip side, keep in mind that the English-speaking countries also have very sizable minorities who don’t use English necessarily as a main language.  Whenever I travel to Arizona, Texas or California, let alone in Miami, I frequently transact much of my own business in Spanish, which is the one foreign language (other than very rudimentary German) that I can actually communicate to a reasonable degree in. 

Likewise in the UK, Welsh really is spoken and actively used in Wales, as I found out in Cardiff 2 years ago to my surprise.  Scottish Gaelic was floundering but now, Scottish Gaelic schools are sprouting up all over in Scotland.  In New Zealand, the Maori language actually is widely spoken, and the Maori population is exceeding the Anglophone population now in growth. 

IOW, the borderline is fuzzy, and it’s difficult to really parcel out, even within English-speaking countries, how much (essential) business really is conducted in English versus other languages that enjoy even official use there.  And besides, the English varieties used in the UK and Australia vs. the USA differ from each other in some salient places, both in the spoken idiom and even in the written form. 

Besides, I don’t think anyone would be trying to sum up the GDP of the Anglophone countries and compare to China (to the extent that we could even determine how much of the GDP really is English-based), it’s more of a gut-feeling sort of thing.  The USA since WWII has clearly been not only the world’s strongest economy but also political and military leader, and this has clearly been the driver of English as a global language since around the 1950’s or so—even at the height of the British Empire in the 1800’s, French was the common tongue for example, for diplomats or merchants between Bulgaria and Russia, not English. 

If China instead takes the economic crown from the USA and is still seen to be rising in general, people will naturally take their cue and realize there are greater opportunities to be had in focusing on China.  And probably, these simplified variants of Mandarin will come to be more generally used.  Again, this is already happening to an extent in many regional countries. 

If you check out the schools in Korea and some other places in E or SE Asia, the chief object of foreign language study has already switched to Chinese, away from English. 

“it occurs to me that successful Malaysian or other SE Asian businessmen in your meeting were likely Chinese- Malaysians etc”

They weren’t—in fact, when they were kibitzing with each other, they spoke something totally unfamiliar which I inquired about, heard it was “Bahasa Malaya” or some such.  IOW, it was the Malayan tongue spoken by the Malay majority.  They had learned some basic business Chinese possibly b/c of the opportunities for doing business with China and Taiwan, and so by some kind of prior agreement, the meeting was done predominantly in Mandarin.  Also, remember there were Koreans and Thais there, who are definitely not native Chinese-speakers.

“The fact that the non-native speakers who used the pinyin only version of Chinese could not read anything written by Chinese for Chinese, e.g. newspapers, not putting people off”

Right, but again, same problems with English.  The “Singlish” that is sometimes still used in Singapore is basically utterly unintelligible to native-speakers in an Anglophone country, with both being unintelligible to those who speak e.g. Taglish in the Philippines. 

This fragmentation IMHO may be one of the factors that is pushing people away from global English.  The whole assumption with “global English” was that it would simplify international transactions and reduce costs, but it hasn’t done that at all—since regional varieties sprout that differ from Anglophone country English so much, and even from each other, these countries wind up right back where they started, stuck with unintelligible dialects that they have to translate back and forth.  This is why so many European companies have soured on the global English idea already, they use such different English varieties and neither side knows what the other is really saying, so they just fall back on their own native tongues which they know well, and translate. 

German companies for example increasingly just issue press releases and other communiques in German, in part since it’s a language of tech literature already, and also since Germany is already such a large economy and really the leader of the European Union itself.

I guess in a similar fashion, the people using pinyin for non-native communication in Chinese aren’t reaching a formal standard as in China I suppose, but maybe b/c Mandarin is more uniform than English is in grammar and vocabulary, some seem to prefer it.  And there are actually pretty good programs to turn a pinyin text into the characters.

Though you’re right, this thing is just highly unpredictable.  It’s just that in my experience in dozens of countries, I have a hard time realistically talking about an international English standard *even right now*.  Compared to the way e.g. ancient Greek just dominated so much of the educated world, English just seems nowhere close.  And if Chinese does move forward to take the top spot within a couple decades, then global English will probably have had among the shortest reigning periods of any big international standard, since it’s really only since the 1950’s or even 1960’s that English started to displace French for example as the main diplomatic and international tongue.  And in fact, I remember back in the 1980’s when I started business, people were still often using French for diplomatic correspondences, I don’t know when the switch occurred but global English may really be that recent.

Greek obviously was big-time important for maybe half a millennium, even the Romans themselves used it as a standard for a while, very early up to about the time Augustus became emperor.  Whereas Latin—wow, international standard par excellence, well over a millennium as a standard basically.  And French had many centuries of dominance.  Heck, even German was the main science language for almost a century and a half.  If English falls out so early, it would be a paltry reign.  Although then again, maybe in our globalized world, any lingua franca might not last all that long.

Not sure how much time Brogan spends in Korea, but though interest in Chinese has certainly risen, the numbers of students in institutes and universities studying Chinese is not even close to that of English. All of the major companies still require TOEIC or other English scores and the last time I spoke with an HR executive I know from LG, Chinese proficiency is a plus but there is no sign that Chinese will replace English as the general second language they look for. Even the people they hire for the China market still need good English scores. Whatever your trade, most information is still in English and this won’t change for some time.

There’s no doubt the Chinese language will take a larger role in Asia, but beyond that it is doubtful. English is already well established in Europe and the Americas. It is a language that is far easier to learn for them and that will play a determining factor. As long as there is big business to be done in the West, English will remain a language that Asians will study. The new generation will probably have to learn English AND Chinese to remain competitive.