Mandarin, English, Spanish and Hindi

>You seem to think that western culture and ideas is symbolized by english. Don't you know that english is only one of the western languages ? Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian... ONly in ASia people think that english is the language of all westerners. <

I was using English as an example of a Western language. I'm sorry of I offended you.

Also I was talking about India. As India was a former British colony pre-1948 English was the natural Western language already embraced by it's people.

I feel that the the Indian custom of bending over backward to accomodate English is sad. I have less respect for the country, it is as if no Indian language has the technical ability to be written in a local language, or in Hindi, spoken by over 600 million people. For instance, the national website of Microsoft in India, www.microsoft.com/India/ is written entirely in English. The website for Norway, meanwhile, www.microsoft.com/Norge/, is written in Norwegian. It is quite sad that a country of some one billion people does not have a website in its own language while one of some 4 million does.

Chinese : « CHINA will show its overpowering strength to the world. »

Pour l'instant le PIB chinois est l'équivalent du PIB français. Faudra repasser dans 20 ans...

Hmm... I'm a resident of Hong Kong, and though I might secretly agree with parts of what "CHINESE" said, I think he's a bit brash and rudely nationalistic. I apologise on behalf of my fellow Chinese citizen, and I assure you that most of our nationality are not in his mould.

On Taiwan...
I'm in favour of reunification and I do believe that the Taiwanese dialect is only a subset of dialects present on the mainland.

However, please do observe that without international leverage, the PRC-ROC conflict might potentially become violent and bloody.

<Pour l'instant le PIB chinois est l'équivalent du PIB français. Faudra repasser dans 20 ans... >

Dans 20 ans, Chine probablement sera la puissance du monde . Mais en 50 ans, je dis que l'Inde tirera en avant.

L'Inde est la plus grande démocratie du monde. Elle a un des économies croissantes les plus rapides. Je pense que l'Inde tirera en avant à la fin. Les gouvernements communistes ont une tendance d'échouer à leur crête.

----

I do not think that Hindi is very important to learn, or Chinese. They are nice languages to know, but they are spoken in only localized regions. I think that Spanish and English are much more important. The Latin American economy is growing rapidly, in about 30 years it will be strong enough to challange China and India if trends continue (for all three). If you already know how to speak English, Spanish is the next step.

JR: >>I do not think that Hindi is very important to learn, or Chinese. They are nice languages to know, but they are spoken in only localized regions. I think that Spanish and English are much more important. The Latin American economy is growing rapidly, in about 30 years it will be strong enough to challange China and India if trends continue (for all three). If you already know how to speak English, Spanish is the next step.<<

From the previous posts it seems to me that even if Hindi is the language with the largest number of native speakers in India, English is more favoured by non-Hindi speakers as a lingua franca. The reason may be that they perceive English more "neutral" than Hindi. Of course, this is only the way I see it. The same situation may be typical to many African countries.

Although I do agree with JR's statement that English and Spanish are both "important" languages internationally (even if the spread of Spanish seems to be more typical to North America than to the Old World, i.e. Europe, Asia and Africa), I do not entirely agree with the statement on the status of Chinese. Of course, it may be troublesome for a Westerner to learn Chinese, especially with regard to the writing, but there are telling signs that many Westerners fell they (or their children, at any rate) will need Chinese in the future. A recent article in Hungary's leading daily papers spoke of an increasing number of people in the US who hire Chinese babysitters, so that their children might master at least a bit of spoken Chinese. Also, even if English is still the most widely learnt language in South-East Asian countries, more and more people venture to learn Mandarin as well, and the number of Mandarin language schools is growing rather fast there.

Holly: >>That's the advantage India has over China. The fact they embrace English in everyday life. Even in Governmental departments official documents are either English or Hindi. I doubt the Hindi language would disappear and be replaced with English - Indians are typically nationalist (in a good way) to protect culture and their language. They just learn to embrace Western ideas with one hand and with the other hand hold onto Indian traditional.<<

It seems that English, even if it was the language of a colonising power, came as a convenience to such a multilingual country as India. It seems that it is more widely accepted as ay lingua franca than Hindi, which, however, represents national identity, and therefore has an important symbolic value (while, of course, being also the largest native language in India).

By the way, given China's relative isolation throughout most of its earlier history (up to the 19th century at least), and the absence of colonisation, I would find it impossible that English should ever gain the same importance there as in India. Also, most non-Mandarin speakers generally seem to be more ready to use Mandarin than non-Hindi speakers to use Hindi. This seems to be connected to the fact that even if they don't speak Mandarin, but another Chinese language related to it, they still identify themselves as Han, that is, members of the dominant ethnic group, which comprises more than 90 per cent of China's population.

On the other hand, Indians seem to identify themselves with their own ethnic or religious group/caste first, and only then do they look at themselves as Indian citizens. At any rate, it seems that they don't look upon themselves as "less Indian" when they use English with members of other ethnic groups. The fact that they are open to embrace English was demonstrated to me very clearly, when I met some Indians in Hungary, and they spoke English among themselves on an excellent, native-like level. Of course, they might-have been "Anglo-Indians", or at least educated in an English school, and maybe this picture is different in rural India.

I think English will remain the most important international language in the next centuries.

The Chinese language will never be a international language for its complexity.

I know nothing about Spanish or Hindi. One foreign language (English) is already too hard for me, I have no time to study another language.

In China, the second foreign language must be Japanese, just because there're a lot of Japanese investments in China (mainly in Shanghai).

CHINESE,
Could you please shut the f**k up?
You shouldn't laugh at India, both China and India are poor countries, China and India should learn from each other. And, China now is LIVING ON foreign investments, I can't imagine what China will be without foreign investments. (Don't watch the news form China Central TV or other TVs in China, or you will become more stupid.)

<<I think English will remain the most important international language in the next centuries.>>
Centuries? I doubt it. The reason for such high numbers of speakers of the English language is because of the number of people that speak it as a secondary language, because they find it useful because of the economic prescense of English speaking countries. Once this precense fades, so will the number of secondary speakers, and English will no longer be as useful, taking into account that it is only a handful of English speaking countries that were controlling the lion's share of the global economy in the past 20 years. Latin American countries, as well as India and China, are going to surpass these countries if trends continue. However the future in uncertain, since India has accepted English as its official language.

If you look at the instructions of the products bought marketed in Asia, one could notice that Hindi or other indian vernacular languaes is/are absent. On the other hand languages such as thai, cambodian, bahasa are there. Languages whose speakers are far most fewer and unspoken in other countries compared to hindi.

If you go to yahoo India it's entirely in english with no links for hindi/bengali/tamil etc.

India has been a cradle of civilization and I don't understand why India does not a have a language of its own at least as a lingua franca if other indian languages cannot accept it is national or official language.

>>And, China now is LIVING ON foreign investments, I can't imagine what China will be without foreign investments.<<

That’s very true. Imagine what if the western world in a tactical movement decided to withdraw out all their investments, and put it somewhere else, like for example in India, China will just collapse, and gets back to its…

>>Don't watch the news form China Central TV or other TVs in China, or you will become more stupid.)<<

I prefer to read that this way: “…or you will REMAIN stupid”

Wong & observer

I just read your posts and would like to say something about China.
I'm a Chinese too, now living in Shanghai city, working as an Engineer.
I would like to ask you that, if you were both intelligent business men, would it be very possible for you to ignore stupidly such a large market as China? Perhaps you could benefit the profits from mainland China, more than you estimated in any other countries. And if you had been doing business for years in China, then it would be more impossible for you to abandon all your factories, equipments, or outstanding potential business. I just think that, if you withdraw your investments despite advantaged policies and comfortable circumstance for no reason, I could only consider you as two foolish men. Of course, you won't do that so childishly, because market is the number one for all the business men.

BTW, to "Chinese",

We're both Chinese, please don't look down on India, though we love our motherland so much. We should hope that, all the people, around the world, have a nice future and have a good life.

Yo soy estadounidense (claro que mi lengua materna es el ingles), y yo estudie el espanyol por 3 anyos. Ahora, hace casi un medio ano que no lo estudie. Creo que mi nivel es buena para el tiempo que he pasado aprendiendo el espanyol pero creo que ya he olvidado mucho desde de que yo deje de estudiar el espanyol. Probablemente yo he cometido errores en este mensaje, pero no importa. Estoy seguro de que mi mensaje se puede entenderse. De todos, modos yo se dos de los cuatro idiomas en el titulo de este hilo. Sin embargo, ahora yo estudio el frances tambien, aunque no es mencionado en el titulo, quiero decir que yo lo estudio. Es mucho mas dificil que el espanyol en mi opinion, porque la ortografia no no demuestra muy bien la pronunciacion. Por eso, no puedo puedo pronunciarlo nada correctamente.