[free_rms]

If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it. That's a way bigger deal than any (often overstated) difference in freedom or innovation.

[coldtea]

>If China became democratized tomorrow, overnight, with no attendant problems, they'd still speak Chinese and the rest of the world still wouldn't know 3 words of it.

The world didn't know 3 words of French when that became dominant "linga franca", and din't know English when that replaced it, either.

People learn X's language because there's an advantage of knowing it and doing business with X, they don't do business with X because they speak their language.

The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese, with some Spanish thrown in...

[free_rms]

Fun fact, lingua franca actually refers to a frankish-arab trading pidgin.

Back on point, that will take time, and it will follow china becoming dominant rather than leading to it. Also, Europeans learning French is a fairly easy lift compared to Americans learning Chinese.

[type0]

> The future language will probably just be some bastardization of English and Chinese

Threre's already Singlish in Singapore, something like that would have no chance to be a future language. Esperanto has more potential and that's a half dead language.

[wonnage]

Chinese is not some mysterious language that nobody knows...

[toyg]

It's a very hard language with a complex written form. There are likely hard upper bounds to its worldwide popularity.

Look at Russian. Even when the USSR was the most fashionable country on Earth, when Western intelligentsia (eh) was massively convinced that Russians were showing us the future, people were not queuing up to learn Russian. Often Russian intellectuals had to speak another language to communicate with the "outside" (when they were allowed to). It was simply too different in its alphabet, too complicated. The same happened with Japanese, despite Japan being a massive economic and cultural power for more than 40 years. Japanese is occasionally fashionable but it will never be a lingua franca.

English might not be the easiest language in the world or the most regular, but it's definitely easier than any Asian language featuring complex glyphs. Its pronounciation rules are relatively easy. Its lineage is markedly European, which keeps it close to French and Spanish and makes it easier to piggyback on their own spread. Even if it were to lose its importance tomorrow, should the US self-nuke or something, chances are that its replacement would still be based on the Latin alphabet. That's what is used in South America, Australia, Europe, and large parts of Africa, regardless of whether they speak English, Spanish, French... So that's what will likely continue to be entrenched, one way or the other. Chinese will grow in importance for sure, particularly in Asia, but it will never be "the" global language.

[dehrmann]

> Its pronounciation rules are relatively easy.

There's a joke that the most common language in the world is bad English. I have a theory that the diversity of English speakers makes it more forgiving of pronunciation, word order, and tonal mistakes than languages with fewer speakers.

[wonnage]

The hard upper bound for English was the British ability to manage hundreds of far-flung colonies.

[raverbashing]

And even the Cyrillic alphabet is not that different from the Roman one (they have common origins, they just evolved different)

Chinese/Japanese is a completely different thing.

[oh_sigh]

Chinese is popular regionally in Asia and among diaspora, but it doesn't have the anywhere near the number of outsiders trying to learn the language to tap into the social/cultural system as English does.

[isbvhodnvemrwvn]

English took place of French, in future mandarin might replace English.

[toyg]

English is effectively half-French, like French was half-Latin, which in turn was half-Greek. Europeans basically moved from a language to its immediate cousin, for more than 2000 years.

Han might be half-something too but it's definitely not something anybody ever spoke in Europe, South-America, or Africa. Europeans will likely never speak Chinese in numbers comparable to modern-day English.

[Twixes]

French and English have much much more in common than English and Mandarin though.

[free_rms]

Compared to English, say.