Of course more people speak mandarin than speak english. But how many of these people are actually worth talking to, seen from our capitalistic world's view? Few thousands, if not even millions of these speaks live in some remote chinese farming village.
Same thing with French, which is spoken by half of Africa.
My money is on english, because it is incredibly easy to learn for anyone, who already speaks any roman language, which would cover most people on the world. (sorry asians)
im going to pick english. not because its more popular but because chinese seems to hard. like ive heard things like it not until year 10 in school that student can write a story.
i think english is simple if you ignore the unecccessary complicated parts. like you can have a converstation using many smaller words to get around using the bigger ones.
maybe it will be like firefly and be a mix of english and chinese.
and even at the moment there are many english speaking coutrieds but they dont speak english. they speak Us english or UK english or NZ english. there are so many differences.
Nope, English is the most widely spoken, not the most common first language, but by far the language the most people can speak to decent degree. And the one spoken in the most places.
English. I want my home language and I want everyone else to want it.
And English is easy to learn, hard to master. Good.
English has many words and can very well express almost any emotion. good.
Lots of people already know it worldwide. Good.
English is the international language for both business and computers. That alone means it's already the global language. But in terms of population, more people speak Mandarin than any other language and more countries speak French than any other language so who knows.
one "world language" would be very cool.
i'm german, but english sounds way cooler and isn't hard to learn, so i think english would be a great world language.
yeah i think it's much easier. german has that er - sie - es stuff (your nickname tells me that you speak some german, so i hope you understand what i mean) and other weird grammarrules. and english sounds cooler in my opinion, it's an easygoing language and you can speak it much faster than german (zero punctuation won't sound nice in german).
I am german and i dont know what you mean with that er-sie-es (he-she-it) stuff .
if you are talking about the different genus of nouns, like the candle uses the female, the house the neuter and the dog the male form of articles, then yes, that is pretty complex and one of the major problems of foreigners learning german.
As much as i love the english language i just don't get why it should sound cooler. You can speak german as fast as english, both languages lose some quality in phonology though, but i see that some stuff like the "auslautverhärtung" ( german words ending with b,d,g sound as if they end with p,t,k)and the plosive sound in the beginning of vowels (which is a major reason why people think german sounds rough and harsh, one that we ourself dont really realise. There is a wee little throatsound in front of words starting with vowels called a glottal stop) makes it a little bit harder to do so.
But as far as there is no one english sound, but many varieties and dialects with massive differences, just the same as with the varieties of german and probably every other language, its hard to compare, because no one here knows what your variety of german is and which one of english you are refering to.
Another thing mentioned, english being easy to learn, is also very subjective. For Middle Europeans with a germanic or romanic language it is really easy. Especially if your native language is germanic.
I heard of english students having huge problems learning old english, while we started translating in the 1st lesson because it was basically a slightly different old german.
The big problem of english is though, that the ways a word is written and pronounced, dont have much in common.
I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead--it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake, don't call it deed!
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)
A moth is not a moth in mother;
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear;
And then there's dose and rose and lose--
Just look them up--and goose and choose;
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go, then thwart and cart.
Come, come, I've hardly made a start.
A dreadful language? Why man alive,
I learned to talk it when I was five;
English. It has become so engrained in every facet of life, from business to politics, education to the Internet, that you are severely limited if you don't understand English. As long as that situation remains, regardless of how easy it is to learn, then it will remain the dominant language. I doubt, however, that even English will ever become the sole language for Earth.
What will probably happen is that there will be a narrowing of languages so that there are a handful of dominant ones.
I think it would have to be english if not some kind of new Phonetics based language. I mean Natural english speaking places lose the culture of having to be bilingual, but everyone else has to learn our language. The only other languages that come close to being used that much are by countries with massive populations that kind of just force roll their numbers by having more people than the rest of us I,e china.
I know, but (to my knowledge) there's no evidence as to what the actual language is like. Not certain on that though, and there are plenty of different dialects (as well as whole different languages).
I don't think they've ever tried to give actual examples of words, IIRC High Gothic and Low gothic are just decendents of a mixture of all the main languages on earth today. Give our current languages 40,000 years of mixing and development and I reckon they'd be pretty hard to recognise.
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