Why Chinese May Not Become the Next International Language?
A lot of people I've talked about have been thinking that if and when China becomes the next superpower, then Chinese will displace English as the next international language (or Lingue Franca, which is a common second, non-mother language). People say: "before English, there was French, and before that, people used Latin", so it's possible English will be displaced too.
This is all well and sound, but there is some historical evidence that shows that often the local (or in our case - global) superpower has displaced another while the lingua franca has not changed. As a result, it is not certain that English will be displaced by Chinese even if China becomes more dominant.
For example, Aramaic was used as the lingua franca in the Near East during the reign of several empires:
- The Assyrian empire - in the Old Testament, the Jewish diplomats ask the Assyrian diplomat who came to Jerusalem to speak "Aramaic" instead of "Jehudan", so the rest of the Jeudans won't understand.
- The Chaldean Empire (also known as the Neo-Babylonian Empire). After being exiled to Mesophotomia, the Judeans interacted with their non-Judean peers in Aramaic, which they retained after some of them returned to Judea.
- The Persian Empire.
- The Hellenistic Period
- Aramaic was also spoken at the simultaneous times of The Roman Empire, the Parthian empire and the Persian empires. Jesus and his disciples used Aramaic as their native tongue, and it was also extensively used for writing the Talmud.
Greek was similarly extensively used after the end of the Hellenistic Period, well into the middle ages.
I can also think of some reasons which will make it difficult for Chinese to displace English:
Chinese does not have an alphabet, but instead is using a complex logogram which contains thousands of glyphs that are hard to learn and memorise, especially for adults.
Furthermore, from what someone once told me, that still does not make Chinese books shorter, as they tend to be roughly the same length as their English originals.
Chinese has a poor selection of grammatical tenses. Whereas English has "to go", "went", "is going", "was going", "going", "go!" and also distinguishes between singular, plural and first, second and third person, Chinese only has one form for all of these. While, they have some optional modifiers, they tend not to use them. That may make Chinese poorly expressive for today's needs.
A Chinese correspondent told me that Chinese people tend not to think of time a lot, in a classic Sapir-Whorf sense.
China has many English speakers, though their English often tends to not be very good. I was told it is the country with the largest number of English speakers in the world (by volume), but naturally, this will require a citation.
So I think that for better or for worse, Chinese will not displace English as the international language, regardless of how much some people think it is likely to happen.